Tom Bradley, Staying after School (story)

"The Pope! How many divisions has he got?" --Joseph Stalin.

Bu Yu was standing right in front of the most dangerous place in town: the Public Security Bureau lockup. His legs had seized up at the knees and would convey him no further; so he began to try to pass the time of day with the People's Liberation Army men at the gate, hoping small talk would somehow allay their suspicions as to his motives for loitering in such a sensitive spot. At first they just glanced at him and tried to brush him off like a dung beetle. But his persistence gradually began to embarrass them. The longer he insisted on sticking around, the likelier it became that someone whose opinion they valued, an inexpensive whore, perhaps, or the cadre in charge of their promotions--or any sentient adult at all, for that matter (these urbanites had an inflamed sense of face, living so crowded together)--might come along and mistake this madman for an associate of theirs. So they dragged him, locked legs and all, into the guardhouse. They slammed the door and commenced interrogating him. He could barely hear his own replies over the barbarian music grunting from their tape machine. "So what do you want from us?" "Just exactly what I've been saying I want all along: to visit the lockup." "He's a Taiwanese spy." "He's a beggar from Anhui. He has no little brother but hunger. He wants to sneak in and pass himself off as an inmate so he can enjoy the delicious food we serve here." "Yes, for example the chao fan with peanuts and prawns." "And the shredded pork-stuffed pancakes in Sichuan pepper sauce." Seeing these phrases produce an effect on neither his salivary glands nor the pupils of his eyes, the green men became a little more serious. "This is not just an empty rice bucket we have here. There's something more inside him than a digestive tract." They began to brandish their automatic weapons in his face. "We could kill him right now and rid the workers of another social parasite and nobody would be angry with us. He obviously has no mother to weep and wedge her flopping breasts between the gratings of our gate." "No mother but foul crotch-odor." "But I know someone who would be angry with us: the dogs. There'd be nobody from whose face to lick the pus-curds and rat shit late at night." "Screw the dogs. Let's kill him now." "But wait. Haven't we been instructed in political study meeting that no real beggars are left in our glorious Republic? Just millionaires in disguise, who glean entire cart-loads of foreign exchange currency from guilt-ridden overseas Chinese tourists. This Anhui beggar probably owns a five-room mansion with indoor plumbing, situated picturesquely upon several acres of fertile drainage plain outside town. He's a fraud, playing upon the natural sympathy of the yellow race and spoiling the appearance of our modernization with his filthy presence! Will we shoot him now and let him pass so painlessly through the gate to class-enemy Hell?" "Certainly not. These capitalists fear dispossession a thousand times more than death. He must leave a little something as security before we allow him to take his natural rest with the executees." "Do you have any trinkets, Stinky? Any relics? They're all over town, and I'd like a little something to take to my sweetheart on Flower and Willow Lane. Perhaps some jewels sprinkled from the dynastic titties of Empress Wu Zetian on one of her fabled pleasure-jaunts to our humble streets, time gone by?" Bu Yu smiled and asked, "Is your sweetheart a philatelist?" The butt-end of a rifle smashed into his temple. "How dare you say such nasty things about a sweet girl you haven't even met yet?" One of the comrades somehow managed to stop laughing long enough to define the term while Bu Yu applied pressure to the redness jetting from the side of his head. "I have some wonderful ancient stamps," said Bu Yu, "from before Liberation." "Elder Brother burned those in the Four Olds Movement, and we're still not allowed to do anything with them but turn them in." "That's exactly why they're so very valuable. See?" Bu Yu pulled a fat envelope from his decaying tunic. To his horror, many of the stamps had fused and melted together in his sweat and blood. He could do nothing but try to deceive these ignorant young men. "I have one here from America. Triple-thick paper and special asymmetrical shape, see? It's what they call modern art, the decadent way the colors run together. That's the American Chairman Nikison when he was a field marshal collaborating with the Nationalist forces in Shaanxi against the Japanese aggressors. This was before the White Army split with us." They looked skeptical. "Why doesn't that horse he's sitting on have a barbecue-spit jammed up its ass and out its throat, like all its brothers in those days up north?" Bu Yu made himself look shocked. "Didn't you know the Americans airlifted entire cavalry regiments to Shaanxi in 1928? And didn't you know the flesh of U.S. horses is poison, due to their being fed Negro babies twice a day? I thought everybody who'd been to middle school and paid attention knew that." "Dog farts. This clown is having fun with us. Time to say zaijian." Someone smashed the muzzle of a gun into Bu Yu's temple and pulled the trigger. The soles of his feet rocketed into the roof of his skull, his kneecaps and entrails dragging behind in a ragged red stream. It was a sensation he hadn't felt in fifteen years or more: the self-inflicted agony of anticipated automatic weapon-fire that never came. It had to be worse than the real thing because it left a memory of the horror. The rapid, impotent clicks of the firing pin in the empty chamber and the cackles of the guards penetrated Bu Yu's scrambled brain cells, and came to his consciousness transformed into words. * * * * You can storm the provincial party headquarters. Please do. Attack the army and kill as many of them as you wish and steal their weapons. Burn the police stations. Detain, interrogate, torture the militiamen. Nobody will fight back. Would you care for a guided missile or two, just to speed things along? It's right there, for those of you courageous and clever enough to outwit its tenders. But don't go near the broadcasting stations or you will be shot on sight. It wasn't until these words came back to him that Bu Yu realized why his legs had seized up in front of this guardhouse: the radio station compound was just beyond. It was sentried in these relatively placid, bourgeois times by a single machine gun. Two decades before, if not for that immemorial injunction from on high, the little man behind the weapon wouldn't have caused a second's hesitation to a junior middle school auxiliary unit of Red Guards. But today Bu Yu had been unable to do anything but pretend to flirt with these Public Security Bureau maniacs next door. And it took a physical act of will to prevent himself from remembering certain words somebody had once uttered which tarnished and cheapened the golden years of his life as a teen revolutionist. Once the will drained away, as it had been doing more and more readily over the past couple of weeks, the voice inside his head screeched out to him: