The barrage started again, but he said, “What are they going to do to the zombies?”
“They’re going to eradicate them, like they did everywhere else.”
“Why?” he asked.
This puzzled the mob. “Don’t you think they should be?”
He shook his head.
“Gerrold! Why not?”
Why not indeed? “Because,” he said, slowly, and the silence came down, except for the clicking of cameras and the hum of the news vans idling, “because they’re just … like animals. They’re just doing what’s in their nature to be doing.” He shrugged.
Then the barrage started again. “Gerrold! Gerrold! Do you think people are evil?” But by then he was on his way to a military trailer, an examination by an army doctor, a cup of hot coffee, and a meal and a long hot shower.
Behind him the city was dark. At the moment, it felt cold behind him, but safe, too, in its quiet. He didn’t really want to go back there. Not yet.
SPECIAL ECONOMICS
“What are you doing?” a guy asked her.
“I am divorced,” she said. She had always thought of herself as a person who would one day be divorced, so it didn’t seem like a big stretch to claim it. Staying married to one person was boring. She figured she was too complicated for that. Interesting people had complicated lives. “I’m looking for a job. But I do hip-hop, too” she explained.
“Hip-hop?” He was a middle-aged man with stubble on his chin who looked as if he wasn’t looking for a job but should be.
“Not like Shanghai,” she said, “Not like Hi-Bomb. They do gangsta stuff, which I don’t like. Old fashioned. Like M.I.A.,” she said. “Except not political, of course.” She gave a big smile. This was all way beyond the guy. Jieling started the boom box. M.I.A was Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lankan hip-hop artist who had started all on her own years ago. She had sung, she had danced, she had done her own videos. Of course M.I.A. lived in London, which made it easier to do hip-hop and become famous.
Jieling had no illusions about being a hip-hop singer, but it had been a good way to make some cash up north in Baoding where she came from. Set up in a plague-trash market and dance for yuan.
Jieling did her opening, her own hip-hop moves, a little like Maya and a little like some things she had seen on MTV, but not too sexy, because Chinese people did not throw you money if you were too sexy. Only April, and it was already hot and humid.
She had borrowed the English. It sounded very fresh. Very criminal.
The guy said, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” she said, adding three years to her age, still dancing and singing.
Maybe she should have told him she was a widow? Or an orphan? But there were too many orphans and widows after so many people died in the bird flu plague. There was no margin in that. Better to be divorced. He didn’t throw any money at her, just flicked open his cellphone to check listings from the market for plague trash. This plague-trash market was so big it was easier to check online, even if you were standing right in the middle of it. She needed a new cell phone. Hers had finally fallen apart right before she headed south.
Shenzhen people were apparently too jaded for hip-hop. She made fifty-two yuan, which would pay for one night in a bad hotel where country people washed cabbage in the communal sink.
The market was full of secondhand stuff. When over a quarter of a billion people died in four years, there was a lot of second-hand stuff. But there was still a part of the market for new stuff and street food, and that’s where Jieling found the cell phone seller. He had a cart with stacks of flat plastic cell phone kits printed with circuits and scored. She flipped through; tiger-striped, peonies (old lady phones) metallics (old man phones), anime characters, moon phones, expensive lantern phones. “Where is your printer?” she asked.
“At home,” he said. “I print them up at home, bring them here. No electricity here.” Up north in Baoding she’d always bought them in a store where they let you pick your pattern online and then printed them there. More to pick from.
On the other hand, he had a whole box full of ones that hadn’t sold that he would let go for cheap. In the stack she found a purple one with kittens that wasn’t too bad. Very Japanese, which was also very fresh this year. And only one hundred yuan for phone and three hundred minutes.
He took the flat plastic sheet from her and dropped it in a pot of boiling water big enough to make dumplings. The hinges embedded in the sheet were made of plastic with molecular memory and when they got hot, they bent, and the plastic folded into a rough cell phone shape. He fished the phone out of the water with tongs, let it sit for a moment, and then pushed all the seams together so they snapped. “Wait about an hour for it to dry before you use it,” he said and handed her the warm phone.
“An
He shrugged. “Probably okay in half an hour,” he said.
She bought a newspaper and scallion pancake from a street food vendor, sat on a curb, and ate while her phone dried. The paper had some job listings, but it also had a lot of listings from recruiters. ONE MONTH BONUS PAY! BEST JOBS! and NUMBER ONE JOBS! START BONUS! People scowled at her for sitting on the curb. She looked like a farmer, but what else was she supposed to do? She checked listings on her new cell phone. Online there were a lot more listings than in the paper. It was a good sign. She picked one at random and called.
The woman at the recruiting office was a flat-faced southerner with buckteeth. Watermelon-picking teeth. But she had a manicure and a very nice red suit. The office was not so nice. It was small, and the furniture was old. Jieling was groggy from a night spent at a hotel on the edge of the city. It had been cheap but very loud.
The woman was very sharp in the way she talked and had a strong accent that made it hard to understand her. Maybe Fujian, but Jieling wasn’t sure. The recruiter had Jieling fill out an application.
“Why did you leave home?” the recruiter asked.
“To get a good job,” Jieling said.
“What about your family? Are they alive?”
“My mother is alive. She is remarried,” Jieling said. “I wrote it down.”
The recruiter pursed her lips. “I can get you an interview on Friday,” she said.
“Friday!” Jieling said. It was Tuesday. She had only three hundred yuan left out of the money she had brought. “But I need a job!”
The recruiter looked sideways at her. “You have made a big gamble to come to Shenzhen.”
“I can go to another recruiter,” Jieling said.
The recruiter tapped her lacquered nails. “They will tell you the same thing,” she said.
Jieling reached down to pick up her bag.
“Wait,” the recruiter said. “I do know of a job. But they only want girls of very good character.”
Jieling put her bag down and looked at the floor. Her character was fine. She was not a loose girl, whatever this woman with her big front teeth thought.
“Your Mandarin is very good. You say you graduated with high marks from high school,” the recruiter
