The Roof Guardian

CHAPTER ONE—THE CITY OF WHITE SKY

Above the city in the white brightness of the clouds and steam, the dragon’s puffs could be seen from miles. The dragons themselves, from the countries they’d been shackled up in and brought here from, had not been such things as this before. But now they lay, on the outskirts of Kyrin’s town, slaves to the society that made them and slavers to the society they lived in now. They puffed and belched and steam rose and steam rose and finally there up above the city they could see their own breath imprinted on an otherwise blue sky. The city itself, other than the dragons, was perhaps unremarkable. It contained, among other things, a few shopping malls of the kind where a McDonalds sat on one corner, another fast food joint on another and shimmering lines of well-polished floors leading from one store to another, where the people of the town wandered and shopped and wandered and gossiped and stayed out of the reach of the white sky; whose whiteness seemed to convey to them that it was summer time or daytime, and they kept in the air-conditioned coolness, the refrigerator feel, of the stores and the shiny floors and the malls and didn’t go out to look at the sky and the dragons and the city.

The city’s other streets and various corridors also resembled shopping malls themselves sometimes, sellers and people converging there just as happily as they might in one of the foreign-style, locally owned shopping malls. Women and men on giant tricycles or bike trucks weaved in and out of traffic, stopping on the curb to catch their breath and offer pomegranates at two yuan, a bag of apples for less. Banana sellers seemed to be the happiest, carting their oblong fruit throughout the city, but it’s not clear why.

A multitude of persons lived in the city, under the breath of the dragon-factories. They worked in the factories as well, churning the machines that made the steam that blew to the sky and whitened out the sun. The women, coming home from a day or night at work, when faced with the general brightness that signaled the sun in the swirling, whitened sky, would shield their faces with tattered, unread paper or embroidered, sparkling sun umbrellas, depending on their income bracket, so that the minimal UV rays filtering through the city’s air would not darken their own skin and leave them, so they hoped, as white as the sky itself.

The city did posses some parks, and beautiful parks they were. Near enough to the dragons that the people living there and working inside the bowels of the chained beasts could come and enjoy their lunch, walk a bit, play some chess, or indulge in marital infidelities there. A walk in the park, or a peek under a bush could bring a surprised man and woman flushed out of hiding into the hazy grey of the day, out of the primordial smells and pleasant muck of sex and into the gritty, white-out world they lived in.

This was a happy city. A productive city. A city that did not know hunger. The people fed the dragons, worked their jobs, went on their walks, bought their produce from the men and women circling on carts, bought their clothes from the shops in the shiny malls, or at least bought them from the shops on the street which specialized in facsimiles of the products for sale in the shining Western malls and walked around the real thing proudly in their knock-off clothing, rejoicing in the bright lights so unlike the light of the milky sun and the icy blasts of air conditioning that cooled the passions and gave one a head for business.

It was a happy city not just for workers but also for families. Grouped in and among the whorls of highway that brought the worker bees into the dragon’s lairs were schools and training centers. The children of these shoppers, these wanderers, these happy modernists, were woken up early, sometimes before the grey light of morning hit their dusty, yet well cleaned windows and bounced down to the streets stories below. The children donned their little uniforms, blue and white, white and red, and went out to be the youth of tomorrow, the children of the future, the hope of the past, brightening the browns and grays of the shop fronts and rusty bicycles to school.

The schools’ courtyards featured mostly grey concrete but sometimes some green grass where the children would come out under the bleak sky and do exercises and march up and down and be ready for the challenges of the coming days, or at least tell their teachers they were. The children recited things by rote, learned songs, stood quietly, and understood that there were many rules to follow.

Some of them, the ones whose fathers and mothers pulled the big chains and pushed the big buttons in the dragon-factories, or the ones whose grandparents had known better and had stocked away, or the ones whose behavior in the schools wasn’t up to the par and so their parents for shame and glory and the thought of their children slaving in the dragons themselves in the far but not so distant future of milky air and bright white skies, sent their children to English school.

The city was proud to have, as all cities of its type are proud to have, a selection of English schools for the betterment of its youth. Not so near the dragons, and nearer to the shopping malls of shiny, waxed floors and away from the fruit carts and closer to the fake-mark cars and zooming motor scooters that flooded the city at rush hour and shift change, which sometimes happened to be the same time and sometimes didn’t, the English schools sat and quietly competed with one another, genteelly letting in the students who could pay and privately excluding the ones who could not.

The schools themselves were full of their own importance, and worked hard to convince the other owners of schools and the children of parents in the city under the bright white sky that their school was better or superior to the one next to it, but few people were fooled and lived as they had always lived and spent their money as they had always spent their money: by going where their friends went and trusting their instincts to guide them in all else.

These schools, for the good of influencing their customers and better educating their customers so that they would in turn bring in new customers, although no one really saw it that way, would bring in teachers from far away to teach their courses. These teachers, from other countries that were not as happy as this one, or at least from cities that weren’t as happy as this one, even if the country itself could not be counted as being particularly happy, for how can 1.2 billion people be happy all at the same time? , were often at a loss for words when they arrived and sometimes during their stay there. There were thin lines between loving and hating, and the dragons on the edge of town blowing their white smoke up into the whiter sky were a normal topic.

The dragons, though, didn’t bother Kyrin Johnson on this day in 2007. She was beyond caring about the air quality, and had she been asked, would probably have been wont to wax a little teary eyed about them.

Kyrin was getting ready to leave.

She lived, as did all the teachers at her particular school, the New Century English Language Training and Procurement of Linguistic Skills School in a boxy little building a few minutes’ walk from her classes. The apartment, as stated, was boxy, but this did not make it unpleasant. As Kyrin had found when she moved there from her homeland, in this city you could tell, it was a happy city. The apartment was on the second floor of a grey box with ramps and stairs clinging to the inside of its boxy exterior

The street below her apartment was made from one smooth curve of poured cement, buckling a little in the spaces placed more or less regularly along the alley way where trees had been planted. Once young and able to breathe with the cement packed down, the trees had let the cement be. Lately though, in the past few years before Kyrin’s arrival in China, the trees had started to revolt, and pushed their woody way up to the sunshine and water their blind roots supposed must be above the concrete.

Kyrin loved these trees and liked the feel of coming home in the evening under the swaying boughs of their tender branches. In one season—she had forgotten now if it were spring or winter, the climate of the place not being so different depending on the time of year—the trees burst open their branches with clusters of sweet-smelling violet flowers. Lilacs, she wanted to call them, but knew they were not. Their sweetness, when they were in bloom, had followed her inside, like a good friend she met on the street and invited up for a cup of coffee. Their aroma, wafting in from the outside, through the iron bars on her windows and balcony that stopped the not-so happy inhabitants of this generally happy city from coming in and stealing her laptop, cell phone, passport and spare cash, would remind her of Ellis and the time they had spent together that winter—or was it spring? Before that day, Kyrin reminded herself severely, she hadn’t spent any time thinking about the flowers outside her window. What did she need those thoughts for?

Coming up from the street, using the fragrant purple flowers as a guide, though not if not in season, Kyrin’s apartment was on the second floor and to the left. Her door was big and heavy and actually consisted of two parts. The first part was a dented metal door that had been engraved with some once-pleasing pattern before the dankness of the hallway and the bleakness of the outside air quality melded themselves with the metal, and before Kyrin had knocked her bicycle against the lower frame too many times. Now, the door looked not like it was protecting what was within, but that it was busy mostly with the giant task of keeping itself on its own hinges. To open this door, which complained frequently in moist weather, she needed a flat key with round holes drilled in both sides. This key fascinated her, and sometimes, without thinking of it, Kyrin would take the keys from her pocket and rub her thumb and forefinger along the little depressions in the key. It helped her concentrate while she watched movies on TV, while she waited for the bus, while she walked to work. She liked this key as much as she disliked the second key, a longer, flatter, more normal key that unlocked the plain wooden door half-hidden by the bars on the steel door, but as much scarred by the horrors of living in the way of people who are sometimes in a hurry and sometimes wield bicycles. This key would catch the soft flesh of her pinkish hand as she caressed the dimples on the first key. This key’s jagged bits tore a hole in the lining of her favorite purse. It poked through her plastic shopping bag once and drained the precious, rare milk she had bought. It reminded her with its ordinariness and its pokiness and its way of hanging around her while she played with the first key, of certain of her friends she had once loved and now didn’t.

Which brings us farther into the story of Kyrin and what she was doing home on a usually happy day while the dragons breathed their breath into the sky and showed the world that the West had met the Eas

She wasn’t thinking about the dragons, the lilac-smelling flowers that weren’t or even about the keys.
She was thinking about escape.

Kyrin made the rounds of her apartment again and again. She circled and circled, like a vulture or raven collecting tidbits to eat or admire. Every once in awhile she picked up something, and either tucked it under her arm or set it back where it had been, but turned a little bit to the side that she was walking, as she wasn’t waiting to put the objects down before she charged off to the next thing. She was, you see, emergency packing.

It had come to pass that the general happiness and obscurity that Kyrin liked and admired about her life in modern-day China had been blown open as surely as the dragon-factories on the edge of the city were blowing dirt and pollution through the city. Ellis was in the police station.

Kyrin had half-expected it, she told herself as she walked purposely into the kitchen to pick up a cup with a Chinese inscription on it that she had bought one day but never deciphered the inscription but nonetheless took her Iron Buddha tea out of it every morning regardless. She looked at the cup and could smell the tea she loved to drink out of it. She set it down, turning the handle toward the sink as she walked in that direction and then abruptly turned and stalked out of the kitchen, down the hall to the bedroom. She needed to observe what little her life had turned out to be already.

On the bed, resting in surprising neatness for her state of mind, were a pile of objects at first insignificant and and second irreplaceable. Looking through a homeless person’s belongings, you see the trash of countless others, the things other people threw away but that have become treasures by the mere fact of ownership; once one has nothing it is easy to idolize anything. But Kyrin was trying to be circumspect, and had whittled her possessions down to an unassuming pile of necessity, her new threatened homeless status notwithstanding.
She counted the items through in her head, on her fingers, and finally on the bed. She counted: her passport, a few battered and sweat-stained traveler’s checks, with the paper wrinkled from being pressed against her body throughout the South China summer, their amount not reaching 200 dollars; a flashlight that required no batteries, only an obscene-like squeezing motion; a packet of Tums for upset stomachs; a few packets of birth control, which she knew she needed more of but wasn’t sure where to get it, or even, after today, if she’d need it; a small grey velveteen jewelers box containing two golden necklaces of negligible value but inestimable sentiment; a hair brush that she particularly liked but could do without; some CDs of pictures made obsolete by her next item; her laptop computer and its speakers; a black zip-up canvas folder that contained her vitals, copies of her birth certificate, university information, work experience, resume; a pen engraved with her name that her friend had given her before she left on this now seemingly ill-advised venture to fame; a die from a casino she had won at just before she came out to Asia, her MP3 player, filled, she hoped with good music to escape with.

Was this her life, she wondered, putting a piece of brown-highlighted hair into her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. All her life, the meaning behind it, the personal connections, the emotions, the passions, boiled down into a smallish backpack.

She caught her breath. She had forgotten something. She wheeled around and searched in the living room, between the faded yellow couch cushions and then in the mess of unfiled DVDs in the console underneath the TV set itself. Finally, she unearthed it from between a copy of a kung fu film and a small burgeoning landslide of silvery, slippery DVDs. Her diary. What good would it be to leave that behind, she asked herself. And what was it doing by the TV? She didn’t know that either, but she doubted it mattered.

Now, her own things piled so loosely together on the bed, she would start to help Ellis. She had tried to call him earlier, but even as she pressed the unforgiving plastic and metal of her phone to her ear harder to make the call go through faster she had no luck. He was being Interrogated, she imagined. Interrogated. With a light on him, and a chair behind him. She gave up chewing on the strand of hair and ran both hands over her scalp. Her hair felt silky and nice, so she did it again. What would Ellis want?
A year together, was that how long it took to know someone? Kyrin wondered. It had been less than a year, much longer than a year, but at the same time it seemed that the white sky and dragon breath kept the time from passing the same way as in other places, as if the time in this happy city had stretched itself to get the most out of her life and ended up giving her both more and less at the same time. Kyrin shrugged again, and grabbed a sock from under the table. Whatever she did now, she might as well clean. That could help her.

Getting Ellis’ things together was harder even than getting her own. She knew the important things, but those were already with him—the money he’d need to pay the fine, the passport he’d probably have the visa cancelled in, the offending laptop that was essentially the cause of it all, or maybe just the instrument, it depended on how forgiving Kyrin wanted to feel. She sat down on the table instead, and put the sock on the place where Ellis usually put his coffee cup.

Was this anger, she asked herself from somewhere deep inside. No, came the answer. What is it then, she asked, grabbing the sock, a crew one, again from the table and wringing it in her hands. She fancied she smelled the purple flowers from outside, but then the musty smell of stale sweat broke into her and she could taste the old whiskey on her tongue and on the inside of her fuzzy mouth. She put the sock down and put her head in her hands. I will not cry, she told herself. No, came the answer. No.

She went back into the bedroom and gathered the things she associated with Ellis. First, she got the things that should have been the essentials. His CD collection. His framed photographs of his family. His battery charger. His camera. His PSP. His baseball mitt and the softball itself. She made a pile on the bed. It got bigger.

She moved her own pile onto the floor and kept piling up Ellis’ belongings. She started to hum as she did it, without noticing and without caring. A, A , ah ah, Apple, she sang. B B, buh, Buh, banana.
She imagined a big apple coming toward the bed and sitting on top of it. A banana followed. They stood up, got the suitcase from the top of the dresser. Under their superb directions, and with the help of CC, suh kuh, Cat, and D, D duh duh Dog, Ellis’ once wildly strewn belongings smushed themselves into the big black embrace of his least favorite suitcase (Kyrin wisely deciding that the best suitcase, because it was smaller, should be hers as she had less things). And then the suitcase, taken up by Apple, Banana, Cat and Dog and even by Z Z, zuh zuh Zebra came along and rolled itself to the front door, banging thorough the battered wooden door and knocked politely on the metal door for an instant, then rolled itself outside and down the stairs. It thumped on the way down.

Kyrin went back and sat on the couch, perched on the edge and feeling the pale, dirty yellow fabric with the fingers of her right palm. In the left palm she clenched the good key, the others dangling and scratching the back of her hand. Ellis would be back soon.
She stared straight ahead, at the TV, at the wall, at nothing. The friendly L L, luh luh Lion sat by with his ragtag, sewed on tail, his googly eyes. He pawed the ground. The banana stood at her right, his waxy peel radiating a luminescence that warmed the small apartment, receiving only the grey light of the sky from the whiteness above, like a fire might in a fire grate in a northern country where the natural color of the sky is the color of rain not of dragon breath.
Kyrin sighed. She stopped recycling her song in her head. The song—a children’s song for teaching them the alphabet—was calming and useful, she supposed. It made her think of working, of tracing the letters on large sheets of paper, a small child’s hand in her own. She sighed again. The song stopped, and one by one, the apple, banana, zebra, lion and other battered, slightly less-colored versions of her images from the song left as they had come.

She was alone now, and her pile of belongings on her bed was also alone. She was still here.

She tried to call Ellis.

He didn’t pick up. Interrogation, she told herself. She imagined him in a dirty police station, like something off of TV when she was young. False wood paneling, a scratched linoleum floor, men in blue uniforms wandering aimlessly, their stout, muscled torsos twisting the blue fabric of their uniformed shirts. Ellis would be sitting down, his legs outstretched, his hair beneath his chin, in his eyes. He would be tilting his head down, and his glasses would sink to the bottom of his nose. He would look over them at his feet in their muddy Converse knock offs, stretch his legs out under his black-and-white camouflage shorts. He would be the most exotic thing in that little bureaucratic office, a jungle bird amongst some pigeons, an orchid with the buttercups. He would be pissing them off.

The call had come for Kyrin at 12:07 that morning. She remembered it well. There was first a shift in the air in the apartment, where she had been studying her Chinese homework and despairing of ever understanding. Ellis, as usual, had been sitting on the couch, playing a video game. She couldn’t remember, she though this one was a car chase. She seldom paid attention to this anymore. The shift in the air had made the back of her neck tingle, his hair ruffle, though he never noticed. She looked up from the swimming lines of the characters on the table in front of her. Before it happened, she felt it, the knock on the door that would knock the ease out of her life, the knock on the door that would knock Ellis out of the country. Even expecting it, the knocking surprised her. Their fists hit on the metal, abused door, rocking it on its hinges and echoing the sound between the metal door and the wooden door. The hinges seemed to bulge toward Ellis, but he didn’t even look up. Kyrin clenched the edge of the glass tabletop and shut her book.

The knocking persisted, a huge, hollow sound, with an ominous beat to it. The doorbell chimed in, like someone was holding it down and it was screaming in frustration. Ringing and banging didn’t seem to faze Ellis; it was like he couldn’t hear it at all. She went and stood behind him, behind the couch, and saw that he had paused the game on the TV monitor, but was still sitting in his game-playing mode, sitting on the floor behind the coffee table, scrunched a little in a way that didn’t seem comfortable but suited him. He just sat, watching the word “paused” flicker on his screen. Not a car chase game, she had noted at the time, a boxing game.

The knocking persisted. The ringing continued. Ellis was on pause.
Kyrin didn’t know what to do. She looked at the bulging door, at the waves of ringing coming from the doorbell, coming into her house and striking everything, knocking it all down.
Ellis stood up and looked at her. He didn’t say anything, but pointed to the bedroom. She understood, yet didn’t.
She went there, and sat on the edge of the bed. She needed to be doing something, so she started refolding the laundry in the hamper at the edge of the bed. A piece of domestic harmony. Something she could do that required the absolute minimum of attention, because every piece of her was focused on the scene that would be happening in the next room.
Ellis opened the door, she heard the locks being drawn back from the wooden door, and then the banging stopped. The ringing stopped. The apartment seemed completely empty of life when this happened. There was no sound, no smell; Kyrin couldn’t even smell the laundry she had in front of her. The grayness came in and swirled its whiteness through the apartment.
When it was done, Ellis was gone. And she was left with a basket of the most perfectly folded laundry she had ever had in her life, or at least since she had lived with her mother and grandmother, the women who had taught her to fold laundry.
They hadn’t found her! They had come and gone, and taken him with them, but Kyrin’s fears for herself had been groundless. In this happy city, with the happy life that everyone lived, they had room and patience and all sorts of happy ideas for English teachers. They didn’t have much patience or happiness for English teachers who also imported pornography.

For that was what Ellis had been in the business of doing. At first Kyrin thought he was kidding. That it had been some kind of joke or game. But it was a serious, profitable enterprise.

In corners of the happy city, the workers came out of their dragons, dodged the rusting, lopsided taxis to cross the roads and go to the plastic chairs and wooden tables and outdoor billiards on cracking concrete under more trees that smelled like lilacs in one of the seasons. Kyrin, being a woman, had never been there.
Ellis had, as part of his business, he told her, in part of his collusion with his friend Jo-Jo, or at least that was the English name this man had picked for himself. She doubted even Ellis knew his Chinese name, and she doubted that it would help him much at the police station with the door-knockers and door-bell-ringers even if he had. This man and Ellis would go among these corners of the city, and stop and chat to the hairdressers who weren’t really hairdressers and dealt with customers interested in lavishing attentions to entirely different parts of their bodies than the crown of their heads, and they chatted to these ladies in their evening wear of short denim shirts and sleeveless shirts and found out who their bosses were and talked to the bosses and sat at wooden tables outside on plastic chairs and found out the best way to make a business go, a way to coax a few more yuan from the workers who came out of the dragon factories, but had not the time or the money, or perhaps even the inclination to go and have their hair cut or pretend to have it cut anyway. There were men in the city who didn’t prefer the attentions of a woman, and would have preferred a fake barber to a fake female hairstylist. There were men who wanted something more exotic than a perm and tubs of whitening cream could. There were couples in the city who lived with their parents and didn’t live near a park where they could go and find a bush, or perhaps the organizers of outdoor greenery in their area had been so inconsiderate as to give them a park with no shady areas, no broad leafy plants. It was these people, specifically the male ones, that Ellis and JoJo pretended to serve.

They bought porn. It was easily come by, when you wanted to know where it was, it was there. But JoJo and Ellis brought more in. They brought in good ones. They went to a small enclave, a city where there had once been a lot of influence from Southern Europe, a place where the middle-managers of the dragon factories and the high-rollers from the other enterprises in this large land of Eastern values and Western money came in. They went there to gamble, to consort, and sometimes to take pictures. But it was a freer port, and more things were available there, things like magazines and videos and toys of sorts, and so Ellis with his boyish hair and lanky legs and white skin (though not as white as the sky) was able to go in and buy copious amounts of smut and carefully in the beginning and not so carefully toward the end, which is why he got caught, bring it back into the happy city to help and get some money from the workers so that he and JoJo could be happier still.

Now, to Kyrin it seemed that in the stuff Ellis sold there wasn’t that much harm in it. It seemed (at least from the one magazine she had seen when she came home unexpectedly and Ellis and JoJo were arguing about something businesslike until she barged in the door and then they packed up their little suitcases and pretended to be playing a video game) that the material wasn’t that bad. Most of the women in the magazines seemed to be old enough to know what they were doing, and the men seemed generally okay with it too, in their plastic, two-dimensional way. There were no pictures of children, no pictures of things that would hurt too much. But the laws of the country specifically avoided the commerce of this sort of item and that was the thing that the door-knockers and door-bell-ringers had had enough of an issue with to come to their apartment and take Ellis away with them.

Kyrin herself was not in the best of positions at this time. The school that employed her to be an English teacher and sing the same kind of song that she sang to Ellis’s stuff to move it out the door to the children in her class to move them out of the lower levels of English proficiency was not the foremost of these schools that sat in their leafy districts and profited on the youth. It was rather toward the back of the pack, and as such it had had to cut some corners when preparing its staff for working in the great land of China. Such as proper visas.

So Kyrin, while not in the country illegally, per se, she had a tourist visa that she’d gotten from the not-so-helpful staff of the Chinese Embassy in Los Angeles, was not a possessor of the proper working visa or the residence permit. Or even, of having been registered to live in this happy city. Many of the teachers she had met were on the same situation, and so she had always considered it to be a usual risk, a small infraction of the greater law. But that’s not the same feeling that comes when the police are knocking down your already ancient and abused doors. Ellis was actually, despite his illegal products, doing business legally. He had a visa that allowed him to work as a foreign businessman, which he had procured with a minimum of fuss in Hong Kong a few months before. He had a company business card made up that said he was the owner and operator of Smut2U enterprises and was hoping that no one asked him about it. The name, you see, had been suggested to him while drunk by his younger brother over one of their long, trans-oceanic phone calls that had probably been monitored by one of the police force, though not necessarily the people who had paid him a personal visit that day.
So while Ellis was opening the battered doors and thinking, no doubt, about his paused game, Kyrin had been folding the laundry in their bedroom and thinking hard about that single tourist visa that took up such an insignificant page in her passport.

That the police did not come into the bedroom to find her or to find the hidden pornography seemed, upon reflection, a minor miracle. Ellis, though, had had a box of magazines ready to go by the door, so perhaps it wasn’t such a miracle after all, she reflected, breathing deeply.
But they could still come back, she thought.
When they released Ellis, would they release Ellis, they might come back and search his apartment? She had to call her school and see if they could put her somewhere else. Perhaps she shouldn’t have packed the things belonging to Ellis; perhaps she should have vacated herself. But she was here and the lilacs reminded her of romance and the key to the door seemed like the only solid thing that she had that would give her any solace. Ellis, in the police station a few miles away certainly couldn’t.
Her phone rang.
Heart leaping, she snatched it up. And held it for a moment listening to the rings. Three rings went by before she would look at the display. Ellis. Jesus, she thought, Jesus.

Hello, this is Kyrin, she said, in a business-like voice inherited from the time she had worked as a receptionist at a casino’s business office as an internship in school.
Kyrin. I’m going. Ellis’ voice betrayed no emotion. She wanted to hit him in the face.
“They’re sending me to Hong Kong. I’ve got to figure out something there. I can’t stay in the country now. I can’t get a hold of JoJo now either.”
“Do you have to pay them money?” Kyrin asked. It was a commonly used business practice.
“I have,” he said. His voice was light. They could have been talking about what to eat for dinner.
“What can I do with your stuff?” she asked.
“Give it to JoJo, if you can find him,” Ellis said. “He can find me.”
“You don’t want me to come and take it to you?” As Kyrin made this offer she felt a little hollow inside, like she was promising away things that she couldn’t afford, but that was the way she had to do it. The words came out without her bidding it. It was a reaction to an impulse, and she knew this but regretted it anyway.
“Naw, wait till I’ve got this figured out. It shouldn’t take too long. Then I’ll be back, okay?” But on that last sentence, Ellis’ voice no longer sounded like he was speaking about dinner, but more like he was speaking about lost opportunities and broken promises, because that’s what he was giving her, she thought.
“Right,” she said. “Okay.” As an afterthought, she added, softly. “Do you think they’ll come and look in the apartment?”
“Almost certainly,” he said. “Why don’t you take some of your stuff and go to Jahmaika’s for the day. That should be fine. Then after that you can come back into the apartment. The landlord won’t care, I gave him a shipment a couple of weeks ago and that should be enough to keep you there.”
“The landlord? A shipment to him?” Kyrin was disgusted despite the gravity of what she had been told. Their landlord was a thin, unkempt man with wolfish teeth and greasy glasses. She didn’t want to think about the type of magazine entertainment that he had been provided.
“Yeah. Don’t worry babe. Got you covered.”

But he didn’t, not really, and both of them knew it. Kyrin was faced with the idea that she was no longer in a couple, but she was as lonely and shackled as the dragons outside of town. Her life here in China, in this happy town had just taken a single feel to it, and she thought she heard the lilac-smelling trees outside whispering to her, whispering that they had known all along about Ellis.
The phone line went dead, but Kyrin kept it to her head, listening not to it but to the trees outside. They had been the ones who observed their courtship. Kyrin had moved to the town the year before to find a job, had been given the apartment by her school, had met Ellis through friends at a slightly less sketchy wooden table with plastic chairs on the sidewalk than the places where Ellis’ network of associates went to peddle their porn, and on a whim, invited him to stay with her. The trees’ flowers had bloomed as their relationship bloomed, and the scent of the flowers lingered whenever she thought of Ellis and their relationship. Now the trees hung with bare branches and their little whips of tendrils hit the glass of her windows. She sighed.
Her backpack was there, ready for her. She needed to make sure all was ready one more time. Got out a change of clothes for a week and tried to decide who to call first, her school or her friend Jahmaika. Jahmaika would be the most useful; she decided, so picked the phone back up and called again.
“Hey girl.” Jamaika’s southern voice came on the line. Kyrin was happy to hear it. Native English tones at this time were something to cherish, she thought.
“I’ve got a situation,” Kyrin said. She was embarrassed to tell Jamaikah what happened. “I need to leave the apartment. I think Ellis is in trouble.” She’d go that far she decided.

“Right, the porn thing?” Jamaikah asked lazily?
“You know?” Kyrin was amazed, but really, she shouldn’t have been.
“Yeah, I know, Abdul has had the same deal over in Guangzhou. Look, it’ll turn right, don’t worry.”
“Abdul? He knows?” Kyrin bit her lip.
“Oh yeah. Abdul does what he has to, man. Making it in this world. Look, honey, you come over here and we’ll watch some Friends on DVD and then maybe some Sex in the City and we’ll forget about this stuff for awhile and we’ll see what can happen, okay?”
Kyrin nodded her head, which Jamaikah couldn’t see, but sensed over the telephone anyway. She made a noise in her throat and then hung up. She knew Kyrin would be over soon, and Jamaikah was pleased. This was all good, she thought as she settled into her brown leather couch and pulled the sheet up to her neck. Jamaikah was pretending to be sick so she didn’t have to go to her job as a translator at a ceramics company today, and thought that while she was pretending she should try to actually act sick, the better to pamper herself.
Jamaikah, who once won a school competition for twirling the baton and had considered herself the height of talent ever since, was what passed for Kyrin’s best friend. They lived under a white, bright sky, but Jamaikah herself was as dark as the plastic casing the dragons pumped out. She was a southern girl, a family from Atlanta, Georgia. She and Kyrin had met on the street while walking to a multinational fast food chain some months before, and had begun, mostly because they were both in their 20s, female and American, to hang out.
Jamaikah sat on her couch and watched the show, thinking about Kyrin. She herself was surprised, not by the phone call or the events that had preceded the phone call—Ellis’s disappearance from Kyrin’s life and the possibility of judicial repercussions—but by the fact that Kyrin had seemed so lost.
She can’t miss him already, Jamaikah thought. Or maybe, the thought struck her suddenly, the same time Ross on Friends kissed Jennifer Anniston’s character, maybe she didn’t know about the porn. She had to know, Jamaikah thought, she thought she knew everything anyway.

For yes, it has to be confessed that Kyrin herself was a bit of a know-it-all. She was full of helpful advice, sometimes bordering on bossy. She imagined herself a little more knowledgeable about most things, but one thing Jamaikah knew more about was life, Jamaikah thought smugly to herself as she curled farther in the brown and black patterned sheet and sunk deeper into her cream-colored sofa. She had known Ellis would pull this stunt a long time ago, and she had known that Ellis was into shady dealings from the beginning, not that her small hints had ever helped Kyrin figure out the truth to it.
But they were friends, and English-speaking friends didn’t come about too much in this city, even though it boasted so many language schools. The other teachers that Jamaikah had run across were possibly as weirded out by Jamaika’s skin as the locals she dealt with every day. Jamaikah, she often reflected to herself, was not a color manufactured in China.
It wasn’t that the people were mean to her exactly, although some admittedly had been. It wasn’t that people were scared, although some of the children were, it was that the people didn’t understand. The constant feeling of being a topic of conversation after she’d left the room, the knowledge that strange questions would start to come to her. She had the bearing of an African Queen, and really the court gossip about her to go along with the court of Marie Antoinette.
Jamaikah sat back and waited for Kyrin to arrive. They would settle down and maybe Kyrin could forget about this all.

Back in her three rooms of sometimes-lilac-scented domesticity, Kyrin was crying.

Her tears ran down her cheeks like rain on a rose petal. She sobbed soundlessly, and convulsed as if choking. It wasn’t very pretty. Her hands shook as she took up the bag and put it on, then took it off and went into the toilet to wash her face in cold water. She had started to cry not because of anything that had happened that day, but because she noticed on the floor a postcard that she had meant to send to her grandmother the week before but had forgotten. She was thinking of her grandmother, of the anticipation her grandmother had for her to live an interesting life, of the smile that would have broken out on her creased face when she picked the postcard out of the post office box, and of the fact that she wouldn’t be able to mail it until the next day at the soonest and probably not even then as she wouldn’t want to go anywhere except work and bed for some time. She thought of the other people she was inconveniencing, of the things that could happen because of her, but not through her fault, but through Ellis’ fault, and she began to hate him a little.
Ellis, in the meantime, was not thinking of Kyrin. His discussions with the police had been less than pleasant, and he had in all honesty expected them to be. He had known, for some time, that this would happen to him, and he was ready with all the glib, smooth answers that he was known for, the same ones that had made him and Kyrin an easy match, because of her self-assurance that she was right and his ability to tell her through swift responses that of course this was true. Sitting on the rough-upholstered chair in the number 6 police office in their happy city, he had no windows to glance at the not-lilac trees through, no TV and couch to remind him of playing video games, no toothbrushes, old photographs, postcards or anything else to speak to him of what he was leaving behind and what he should miss. Really, he just felt sorry for himself.
JoJo had skipped out on him, he was pretty sure. JoJo, at this time, was eating a rou jia mo at a local Muslim food stand and thinking about visiting a false barbershop for his evening’s entertainment. He always perused their wares before he distributed them, and this month’s installments had made him a little more interested than usual. To his defense, he didn’t know that Ellis had been picked up by the police until the next day, when they came for him. Ellis, stroking his fingers on the fake wood arms of the chairs imagined JoJo safely in Macau, eating Portuguese chicken and drinking eponymous beer. He thought of the casino ladies he’d met on their last buying trip and felt himself arouse. This made him cross his legs, which made him contemplate his shoes. The Chinese police staff had put him at this desk to ruminate, he supposed. He’d already been asked a multitude of times about the particulars of his business, both in bad Mandarin, bad English and good Cantonese. He expected Portuguese next, but he doubted even with a fourth language that they’d be able to make him feel sorrier for himself.
Ellis realized this was the last of his time in China. He’d had a good time, Kyrin and her overbearing ways notwithstanding. First he’d been a party boy in Shanghai, teaching some English at a little rundown, fly-by-night English school that just required him to show up wearing pants and collect some money after his lesson. He burned through all of the money he made, learned a little Mandarin from the girls he met on the streets and from the students he actually met with, then the police learned he’d overstayed his tourist visa then, and had high tailed it to Hong Kong, which took a toll even on his parent’s bank account, which was substantial if not by American standards then definitely by Chinese ones. He stayed in Hong Kong as long as he could, staying in a dump in a tall mansion along the mainland side of the territory and enjoying the feeling of being free. He scammed another visa for the mainland by pretending he’d lost his passport and getting a new one and luckily choosing a day to apply for his new visa when part of the computer system was down. He headed off the next day for Macau and Zhu Hai, thinking it to be just a nice trip, perhaps a way he could make some money in the casinos in Macau.
It was there on the floor of the Lisbon hotel, where he’d been trying to persuade the flustered floor attendants that he needed to drink an alcoholic beverage to gamble properly, that he met JoJo. JoJo heard his complaints, talked to the attendants, cleared it up and took him to another casino where his family had a private room. That was where they became friends over a fantastic game of strip poker with Jogo’s teenage cousin who had just come back from a particularly revealing study abroad session in Australia. JoJo offered him a job on the mainland, doing international sales for his family’s business.
And so, Ellis became a courier. He had enjoyed it. Enjoyed going to Macau, enjoyed the good life on the mainland, enjoyed meeting new people and sleeping in and having a nice place to stay and, yes, now he remembered, enjoyed Kyrin.
But it had to stop. His time on the Asian continent was no longer sustainable, and he knew what to do.
Zooming up, for a moment, consider the happy city where these characters live. It is by no means alone in China. It is at once polluted and green. At once poor and rich. At once a place of pornography and great learning. Of beauty and of shame. The millions who lived in its comparatively small embrace counted themselves lucky, and even if they hadn’t they were not in a place where they would go…the culture mandated staying and stay they did. A few daughters or sons strayed to Shenzhen, or Guangzhou, but these sons and daughters kept a love in their hearts for the place they were born and a deep-seated resentment that they had had to leave. The perfect circle of a person’s life consisted of family, career, children.
For the people who lived their happy lives in this happy city under the white sky of the dragons’ breath, it was difficult to conceive of the people like Ellis, Jamaikah, Kyrin, strangers not only in their adopted land but strange people also in their home country. As Kyrin packed her bag again, for the umpteenth time, to walk down the stairs of her apartment, from the roof to the road and then wend her way along the false-lilac road in the direction of Jamaikah’s erstwhile sick-room, she thought about these things, and about her future which had seemed so simple and bright before but now was getting the darkening clouds of a winter storm. Ellis still had not called back; and she had tried to call his number a few times but he never picked it up, assuming that the police had not taken it to try to decipher who his accomplices would be. It was assumed that he would have accomplices; his language skills were abominable. Kyrin didn’t know which had happened, and only imagined him with his flyaway hair in his eyes sitting in a New-York police-station-style barred enclosure, his head in his hands, feeling sorry for her and wishing he could be back with her. This flight of fancy was perhaps all the more erroneous and surprising because Kyrin didn’t even see the smallish suitcase containing Ellis’ belongings that sat, forlornly on the bottom step, it’s seams about to burst and its handle pointing down. It rested on one corner, desolate and unfound. She left it there, seemingly oblivious to its presence.