Faith Gage awoke on her cot in the Meinhard storage room to the squeak of a hinge and the scrape of shoe leather. She squinted toward the doorway and made out a charcoal silhouette against the shadowed hallway. It was in the shape of a tall, thin man with the angular bulge of a semiautomatic on his hip. Four others stood semicircled behind him, two men and two women.
She felt her body tense and her heart jump in her chest. She gripped the bed frame and sat up. She wouldn’t let herself be shot lying down.
The man’s hand rose. His forefinger paused in front of his lips, and then he gestured for her to follow him by a quick turn of his head.
By the profile she recognized Old Cat.
Faith turned toward the sleeping Ayi Zhao as she stood.
“Bu yao,” Old Cat whispered. Don’t.
Faith pulled on her coat, then followed Old Cat down the hall and outside. The tents were dark and still except for faint snoring and a baby’s soft crying that sounded less like a child in discomfort than an adult’s grief-stricken sobs. The guards passed by and waited to the east of them. She could see a red-gray hint of dawn on the horizon.
“It’s time for you to leave,” Old Cat said. “There’s nothing more you can do. You need to go with the others when the van arrives.”
Faith looked up at Old Cat. “How did you know?”
“The army has been listening to your calls and those of your husband and now those of the man coming to get you.”
“But I hadn’t decided—”
“I’ve decided for you.” Old Cat pointed toward the four. “And they will carry out my orders.”
Old Cat looked away, then back at her. She could tell by the distance in his eyes that he was about to speak to her as a professional witness.
“This will all be over in a few days,” Old Cat said. “Soon the army will have learned what it wanted to learn from our efforts and will have no further use for us. And we can’t defeat them.” He spread his arms toward the tents. “I’m not willing to sacrifice these people in a lost cause. Our rebellion will not become a revolution.”
“But what about this?” Faith pulled out her cell phone and scanned through the images, and then turned the screen toward Old Cat. It was an image of part of the front page of the New York Times online edition. “My husband’s office sent me this.”
Old Cat took it in his hands and peered at the words, then shrugged. “I can’t read English.”
Speaking together in Mandarin all during these days had seemed so natural that she’d forgotten the language gap between them.
Faith felt her face flush. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I only wanted to show you proof that…”
Old Cat smiled. “It’s okay. What does it say?”
“That there’s a mass movement of transient laborers toward Beijing. Ten million of them.”
“They’ll fail, too,” he said, shaking his head. “The army is the one who got them moving and is prepared to stop them.”
Gage’s words came back to her: Uprisings in China take lives in the millions, not in the hundreds.
“You mean—”
“No, not with guns this time, but with rice from the military’s storehouses.”
“And you think that they can be bought off?”
Old Cat’s voice hardened. “They’re betraying no one, least of all themselves. For them, from the beginning, for all of us from the beginning, this uprising has been about the basics of life, and for them that’s food.”
In the rising gray light Faith watched Old Cat’s breath condense in front of his face and float there for a moment and then dissipate.
“In the end, that’s all we’ve been able to offer them,” Old Cat said. “I have no ideas about how our lives could be different. I think it would’ve been better if I’d been born as a silkworm and could’ve secreted my world around me like a cocoon, instead of a man who had to create it with his mind.”
He looked down at Faith. “You’ve traveled the world. You know politics and economics. You’ve seen how different cultures have organized themselves. Tell me. Tell me how we can build a different society, one without oppression and exploitation. Show me the model. We’ll copy it.” Old Cat spread his arms. “That’s what we do here. Copy. No people are better at it. We…”
Old Cat’s voice trailed away, and in that silence Faith recognized that neither he nor she knew who that “we” was who would take charge and remake the world.
“What about you?” Faith asked. “What will happen to you?”
Old Cat shrugged. “The army has seen to that, too.”
Faith reached for his arm. “Then come with us.”
“And leave others to be sacrificed in my place?”
“If the army has planned this as well as you say, then they’ve already decided on their victims. What you do is irrelevant to them.”
Even as she said the words, she felt the bad faith of not believing what she was saying. The army would scour the countryside looking for him. She released her grip and lowered her hand.
“What I do is not irrelevant to them,” Old Cat said.
“Then go on your own Long March.” Faith pointed at the tents. “Take them all with you.”
“And come back to what?” Old Cat again smiled at her. “See? We’ve gone in a circle.” His smiled faded. “And I’m trapped inside of it.”
Faith searched inside herself for an argument that would dissuade him, but found none. Now she felt foolish in bringing students to China. She didn’t understand it. Didn’t understand the man standing in front of her. And had nothing to offer him.
But as she looked up at him, there was something that seemed even worse. He was a man without a family, and now no chance to have one, a man who would have no descendants to burn incense and to close their eyes and to bow and to remember him on the anniversary of his death.
Old Cat furrowed his brows, then raised a forefinger and said, “Jian-jun told me that the other name for the one that Christians call the Devil is the Prince of This World.” He lowered his hand. “I think now we both can see why.”
Faith looked past him and through the thin dark smoke at the fading orange moon above the city and felt the whole of the world’s evil shudder through her. She wanted to reach out to him again, this precious man, but she knew he’d withdraw from any gesture of comfort.
Old Cat pointed at the generator building. “Go. Wake Ayi Zhao and Jian-jun and collect your things. The van will be here in fifteen minutes. Your students are already inside.”
“What about Wo-li and his wife?”
Old Cat lowered his voice and leaned down toward her.
“They have escaped.”
He then cocked his head toward the south.
“Perhaps you will encounter them along the road as you drive toward Chongqing.”