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Page 8.
 The trip to Beijing was pleasantly boring. Jack drove for three hours. They changed seats, and he napped. Xuē took the wheel for the second half of the journey. He awoke as she was navigating into one of the world's biggest metropolitan sprawls.
They arrived at Beijing International Airport midway to dawn. They checked into a five star hotel on Xuē's brother's tab. Tired as he was, Jack had looked forward to this moment.
"You sure your brother won't mind?" asked Jack as they stood in the lobby, which seemed like ten acres of polished marble lost in a funhouse of mirror walls. House staff wore gray uniforms with various color hash marks for department designators. The hotel, with branches around the world, accepted all manner of credit services. To Jack, it was like already being in a suburb of San Diego. They did not take a bellman along, since they had very little luggage between them. Xuē held the wine bottle in both arms, as if it were their baby. Jack carried the food basket in one hand, like a proud parent.
"We'll shop and see the city over the weekend," Xuē said. "You fly out Sunday, and I'll take the train home. What a blast, dude!" On the elevator up, as they rode alone, she buried her face in his side, and ran a hot little hand up and down his back, from the knees to the waist.
In the room, they opened up the drapes to reveal a blaze of light all around—Beijing, city of over twenty million souls, and a modern world capital. The hotel was twenty stories tall, but dwarfed by giant corporate towers halfway to the horizon on all sides. Half of these were Chinese-owned, and half international, including enormous Bush Tower, topped by a Texas star, not far from Tienanmen Square. All the towers were crusted with flashing neons, running movies, lights chasing each other, even mile-long green and red laser beams, which formed crackling lines to the clouds above. The lights bounced amid the plate glass windows on both sides, and on marble and other shiny surfaces inside their suite.
While she puttered about, Jack made a sweep of the suite with his Kimber in hand and his senses alert for any sign of Dragon Lady or her slimy agents. The coast was clear, and he sat on the bed to give the gun a quick cleaning.
Xuē strutted delightedly about in a heavy white terry bathrobe with the hotel's logo on it. Not wanting to scare her (yet) in his birthday suit, Jack wore the same as he broke the gun apart and ran a few cleaning wicks through its bore. He dabbed at its lightly oiled surfaces with a dry hankie found in a glass engraved with the hotel’s logo, until he could no longer feel residue grit.
"I'm tired but I want a bubble bath first," she declared as she paraded around, and the air began to smell warm and soapy.
“First things first,” Jack said. He tucked the freshly cleaned gun under a pillow for instant retrieval if needed. It wasn’t, and they had a great time together.
Jack appeared in the bathroom door holding the wine bottle, and watched her pour purple-grape doucement into the tub. "That thing is the size of a country pond," Jack said.
She winked. "Two fish can swim at once, baby."
He said. "I want to see you change from that robe into just soap bubbles."
"And I want to see you up your periscope, Commander."
"Let me open this Cabernet and I'll join you shortly."
"We will be very clean when we go home in two days," Xuē said as she splashed her hands among the suds. "We'll have fun snorkeling around in here."
"I may just decide to take you home with me, you look so cute."
"I talk too much. I can't cook to save my life."
"This evening, you are just what the doctor ordered."
He found a corkscrew in the main bedroom, and brought the open bottle with the two glasses from Baidu into the bathroom. Xuē was already drowsing under an overhead heat lamp, elbows up, with her compact, square toes poking out of the mass of bubbles. Her toenails were red.
"You must have put in a gallon of bubble bath," Jack said.
"The better to hide your submarine."
"Permission to come aboard," he said as he sat on the edge and dropped his bathrobe."
"Hairy chest," she said, wrinkling her face. She reached out to touch. "Not many Han Chinese men are hairy, like you Western apes," she told him. She delighted in pulling, twisting, patting, and petting his arms and chest. "Like hamsters," she said, giggling. But she was silent, and hungry, when they made love between fresh sheets a little later, amid the Blade Runner fire of the futuristic city.
He became intimately familiar with her stories, her family, her plans, and her finely wrought physicality over the next few days. They slept together one last time, Sunday afternoon. They were exhausted from days of making love, walking hand in hand through the city's shopping malls, and soaking in differently scented bubble baths at any time of day or night. They napped—fully dressed and cuddling—until a phone call from the lobby reminded them Jack's flight was due out in two hours. They rode down together, and parted with a lingering embrace and a long kiss in the train station.
"I hope you come to China again," she said. She had bought some U.S. bubblegum, and blew a pink balloon.
"I hope you'll come as well—to the U.S.A."
Xuē's gum exploded as she laughed. "Let's just come together, okay?"
He was acting whimsical, he knew. He did not want to part from her. At the same time, he knew that right now, in his life, nothing could work out, past pillows and bubbles.
"Be well." He gave her a last hug before she boarded her express train. "I'll send you a card."
“I hope we see each other again, Jack.”
“I’ll make a point next time I come to China.”
She snuggled against him. “You save your point until I see you in San Diego some day soon.”
“You can come study chemistry,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
She sighed deeply and hugged him like a teddy bear. Then it was time to part company.
Xuē waved from the train window as she set off for home. Her family lived in the city of Datong, Shanxi Province, a few hundred miles north west of Beijing.
Jack rolled his suitcase onto the hydro-metro, which would speed him off to the Air China terminals for his flight to Los Angeles and an AmericAir hop to San Diego.
On the long flight, Jack sipped a cocktail or two, and read a digitized British spy novel from the 1950s—quaint historical fiction from a long ago, lost world. He dozed several times, dreaming of Xuē and bubble baths with periscopes—not to mention a tropical island, where a submarine could slip into a very, very snug harbor whose mermaid made sounds of pleasure. But he also thought of home, of the D Ranch, of his family there. He all but forgot the Dragon Lady, and her promise to find him and make him die for exxing out her sugar daddy.
Elsewhere in the world, a very different drama was just about to launch its first act, and suck into its tentacles the great powers whose economic powerhouses made the global engine go around. Where its train would stop, nobody knew—but one of the seats had a ticket on it, with Jack’s name on it. Only, Jack didn’t know it yet. And neither did Rector or Claire Lightfield.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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