Reamde

looking the way she did. And yet Zula didn’t get any sense of in-your-face nonconformism. She was not consciously making any kind of statement. This was who she was.

She had approached Zula and struck up a conversation yesterday afternoon. Zula, Csongor, and Sokolov had found their way to a street where a number of tea sellers had their shops, and Zula had been eyeing them, trying to decide which one she would approach, psyching herself up for another round of bargaining. And then suddenly this woman had been in front of her, blue boots planted, smiling confidently, and striking up a conversation in oddly colloquial English. And after a minute or two she had produced this huge bolus of green tea, seemingly from nowhere, and told Zula a story about it. How she and her people—Zula had forgotten the name of the group, but Blue Boots wanted it understood that it was a separate ethnicity—lived way up in the mountains of western Fujian. They had been chased up there a zillion years ago and lived in forts on misty mountaintops. Consequently, no one was upstream of them—the water ran clean from the sky, there was no industrial runoff contaminating their soil, and there never would be. Blue Boots had gone on to enumerate several other virtues of the place and to explain how these superlative qualities had been impregnated into the tea leaves at the molecular level and could be transferred into the bodies, minds, and souls of people condemned to live in not-so-blessed realms simply by drinking vast quantities of said tea. A kilogram of the stuff would vanish in no time and Zula would be begging for more. But it would be hard to buy more in America. Speaking of which, Blue Boots was keen on finding a Western Hemisphere distributor for this product, and Zula seemed like a fine candidate…

If Zula had actually been a tourist, just wanting to be left alone, she’d have grown tired of Blue Boots. But as it was she felt so happy to see a quasi-familiar face that she had to hold back an impulse to gather the tiny thing in her arms.

“Good morning,” Zula said. “You were right. I drank all that tea.”

“Ha, ha, you are full of shit!” said Blue Boots delightedly.

“You’re right. I don’t need any more today, thank you.”

“You want a distributorship?”

“No,” Zula began, but then perceived that Blue Boots was only teasing her and broke it off.

“You are so fricking lost it’s sad,” said Blue Boots. “Everyone on the street is talking about it.”

“We are trying to find a wangba,” Zula said.

“A turtle egg? That is a very bad insult. Be careful who you say it to.”

“Maybe I’m pronouncing it wrong.”

“In English?”

“We are trying to find an Internet cafe,” Zula said.

Blue Boots wrinkled her nose in a way that from most other females her age would have seemed like an effort to be cutesy but from her seemed as pure as the mountain waters of her native region. “What does Internet and coffee have to do with each other?”

“Cafe,” Zula said, “not coffee.”

“Cafe is a place where you drink coffee!”

“Yes, but—”to do with each

“This is China,” said Blue Boots, as if Zula might not have noticed. “We drink tea. Have you forgotten our conversation of yesterday? I know we all look the same to you but—”

“I’m from Eritrea. We grow coffee there,” Zula said, thinking fast.

“Here instead of a cafe we would have a teahouse.”

“I get it. But we are not looking for something to drink. We are looking for Internet.”

“Come again?”

Zula looked to Csongor who wearily held up a piece of paper with the Chinese characters for wangba printed on it. They had been showing it to random people on the street for the last half hour or so. Everyone they talked to seemed to have at least a vague idea of where such a thing could be found and pointed them in one direction or another while speaking earnestly, usually in Chinese but sometimes in English.

“Why didn’t you say so?” said Blue Boots. She pointed. “It’s that way, just above the—”

Zula shook her head. “How do you think we got so fricking lost?”

“Come on, I’ll take you there.” And she took Zula’s hand in hers and began walking with her. The gesture was a bit familiar but, at least for now, it felt nice to be holding anyone’s hand and so Zula laced her fingers together with her guide’s and let her arm swing freely.

It seemed inconceivable that any of them, even Sokolov, would defy her, so Csongor and Sokolov dutifully fell in behind.

The pixie haircut was shaking in dismay. “You need translator, man.”

“Agreed.”

“Excellent!” And Blue Boots let go of Zula’s hand, stopped, pivoted, and thrust out her right. Zula, out of habit, began to extend her hand, then realized she was about to enter into a binding contract and hesitated.

“Awwa!” said Blue Boots, and snapped her fingers in frustration. “Almost had you over a barrel.”

“We don’t even know your name.”

“I don’t know yours.”

“Zula Forthrast,” said Zula quietly. She looked back at Sokolov, who was distractedly gazing around with his habitual, posttraumatic, thousand-yard stare. A trace of a grin came onto her face.

“What?” Blue Boots wanted to know.

Zula killed the smile and shook her head. She had passed her name on to someone. And if that someone were to google the name, what might come up? Perhaps an article from the Seattle Times about a young woman who had inexplicably gone missing.

“I am Qian Yuxia.”

Zula, who had spent her life with her nose pressed up against the window of the straight-haired world, was growingly obsessed with Qian Yuxia’s haircut, which was one of those wedgy, short-on-top, longer-on-the-bottom productions. Someone who loved Qian Yuxia and who was very good with sharp objects had been maintaining this, and Qian Yuxia had just as determinedly been ignoring it.

“Is that a common name where you are from?” Zula asked, just making conversation.

“Yongding,” Yuxia reminded her. “Where the Big-Footed Women make the gaoshan cha. High mountain tea.”

“Are you a Big-Footed Woman?”

Yuxia looked at her like she was an idiot and extended a blue boot.

Zula shrugged. “But you might have a very small foot inside there!”

“I am Hakka,” said Qian Yuxia, as if that should put this entire part of the conversation to rest immediately. “I told you yesterday.”

“Sorry, I forgot the name.”

“What is up? Why are you here?”

Sokolov had now drawn close enough that Zula felt it best to stick to the script. Because they had worked out a script yesterday. “You’ve heard about the conference? About Taiwan?”

“Yes, what are you, the ambassador of Eritrea?”

“I’m here with the American delegation,” Zula said. “Csongor, here, is with the Hungarians and—”

“Ivan Ivanovich,” said Sokolov, with a courtly nod.

“Ivan is with the Russians. We have a couple of days off and so we are just—”

“Chillin’?”

“Yes. Chillin’.”

“Is one of these guys your boyfriend?”

“No. Why?”

Qian Yuxia gave Zula a playful backhanded slap on the arm, as if to chide her for being a slow pupil. “I want to know if it is cool to flirt with them!”

“Sure, go ahead!” Zula had been kind of assuming that Qian Yuxia was a dyke. Maybe she wasn’t. Or maybe she was a dyke who found it amusing to flirt with heterosexual males.

“Your hotel doesn’t have Internet!?”

“Of course it does.” Which did not answer the implicit question. “Csongor is such a nerd that he can’t go a