Black Gate [Pilot]
As Gen rode up the escalator to the wide platform, he found himself stuck. There weren’t lines so much as people crammed in wherever they could fit. The escalator piled more in endlessly. It was as quiet as it could be with so many people on one platform. Most people’s faces sagged in disdain. Most people traveled alone. For a few brief moments, only silence, tension, and the sea of people filled the platform.
The purple-lined train arrived, dragging instant chaos along with it. People fought to get inside. Some, only a couple, fought against the crowd to get out. Standing within a certain distance of the doors gained the benefit of never even having to move to be pushed between them. People often said that a woman could get pregnant by riding this train. People often said one could float if they jumped while riding this train.
It took three trains passing before Gen managed to force his way onto one. Smashing himself against 10,000 other people was the only way to suppress the frigid bite of winter. He’d only witnessed a single fight break out onto the platform as his train pulled away. Few people turned their heads to it. As the final leg of his trip, a half-hour train ride to Shahe continued, he rested his weary head against the window of the door he had squeaked by. It was better to lean against the window than to push back into the school of people swaying to stay afloat with each turn of the train.
Upon arrival to Shahe station, it was just as hectic to get out. The doors opening pushed out a swell of people being held in together by tension alone.
So began the long walk home, across dirt roads and crumbling sidewalks alongside the slowly dissolving lines of people. The stench of cheap street foods boiled in toilet oil wasn’t traveling so far as it did in summer, though the red glow of lights in each stall remained both warm and haunting.
It had been a long day for Gen, one in which the night started in the afternoon and seemed to drone on for countless hours. It was the kind where he had looked at his watch after three hours of work to see that only five minutes had passed. The exhaustion of working overtime piled on top of his two-hour trip back home was what distracted him when he stepped into a disgusting mess. A plastic bag of half rotten something had seeped from the nearby dumpster. It was no surprise. Most of the garbage that made it near the dumpsters was scattered around it instead. The wet squish that accompanied it was one he found particularly jarring as he had almost slipped and fallen in it. To fall from slipping in the slick rot of garbage slop would really have topped off the long hours of work, solidifying the title for shittiest day ever.
He tried to scrape the bottom of his boot free of the red and pink slush onto the pavement, pausing and disturbing the flow of people to the gates of the neighborhood. “Rotten tomatoes or something,” he thought.
With a final and fruitless kick of his boot, he walked into his favorite of the slum markets. Perched in the windows on either side of the entrance were more food stands. One was for pancakes, another for noodles, forced in among storage where other shop fronts might display their signature items. Oily food and scrap wood fronted this shop instead.
It was his favorite not because of the same griddled food as any other stand or stall, but because of the friendly auntie there who always encouraged him to buy fake wine, dyed liquor that “tastes close enough to the real thing,” she insisted. She was self-congratulatory in having chosen something that, in her mind, passed for wine as well as for being transparent with her customers. In fact, it never crossed Gen’s mind that he could ever find real wine here, much like he might never find oil that wasn’t harvested from gutters and boiled “clean” in a broken down village factory somewhere. He couldn’t tell the difference, anyway.
She was also a landlady, following every stereotype as such by keeping herself perched on her plastic stool, munching on sunflower seeds and smoking cigarettes. At any opportunity she would ask if anyone was looking for a place to live. Other times, she would watch idly while people would play at a dusty children’s pachinko machine placed near her perch so she wouldn’t have to move to sell tokens for it.
Tonight was no different, the landlady's small frame exuding such large personality. She always greeted Gen enthusiastically, and he suspected it had something to do with the fact that he was from the same city as her husband. “Hey! Coming for some wine?” Predictable. The wrinkles at the side of her eyes folded in her grin like the fins of a fish on the sides of her face. She spat the husk of a sunflower seed onto the ground, a halo of them surrounding her stool.
“Oh, yeah. Maybe.” Gen was passively looking at snacks, too tired to order something substantial. He liked to allow the landlady the satisfaction of believing she’d convinced him. She began rambling about how she’d just ordered a new kind and how good it was while he tuned her out. He settled on finally peeking his head out to the chubby woman between the shop window itself and the store. She was busy making pancakes for the stream of people passing by. Even this deep in the neighborhood, the streets little more than compacted dirt worn in by thousands of steps each day, plenty of orders kept her busy.
“Hey, can you make me a pancake?” he asked the girl. The cubby in which she was confined was stacked with wood and dust in whatever space she wasn’t using to its full capacity.
“With extra egg. And extra sausage. And pickles, too.”
She nodded. She was too busy and he too tired to express politeness, as things were often the case here on the outskirts of Beijing. He dropped some coins into her jar which rattled against the others as they landed. The landlady was still talking, perhaps too confident in his ability to listen and speak at the same time. She brightened up when he turned back around to tug a bottle of the wine from where it was wedged between shelves, slightly too tall to fit.
He gave a little wink to her when setting the weird dyed alcohol she called wine onto the glass counter. She grinned, offering her packet of cigarettes to him to take one as if they were old pals.
Gen rifled through his wallet for a few crumpled old bills to nudge across to her. She dug through her soggy cardboard box for change while he took one of the cigarettes she had offered and waited for his pancake to be finished.
Glancing leisurely over the bulletin board behind her, all he saw at first were advertisements for seemingly everything. Scanning further, he saw some neighborhood alerts about future police checks and reminding everyone to keep their IDs on them. Among all that was a grainy image of a balding old man in black and white, a hand written warning across the bottom of the picture that he was both a thief and a murderer.
“What’s that?” he asked, gesturing vaguely to the board.
“Oh!” The landlady perked up, having already folded herself back down in her stool. “There was a body found by the west gate. You know, it’s pretty empty over there, so I guess someone managed to dump it. Some of it, anyway. I’ve got good sources bringing this picture to me, but nobody knows who he is. Any ideas?”
This was how things were handled here. The only police intervention occurred when they wanted to bully poor people and shut down shops. The citizens of the neighborhood had to take things into their own hands, with many of the old women in the area keeping watch during the day, their natural will to gossip a strong safety measure. Still, thieves were common. Murder was not.
“Some of it?” Gen asked, raising the communal corkscrew hanging off of her counter to open his wine there. He didn’t keep one at home. He didn’t keep much of anything at home.
“Yeah, in a dumpster. I’m guessing the rest of it is in other dumpsters,” she answered with another puff of her cigarette. He took another of his own borrowed one which tasted strong and metallic. He didn’t react. He hardly ever did.
After the cork popped from the bottle, Gen twisted it free from the corkscrew to halfheartedly press back in with his thumb. He left it loose enough to open on his own again later. He then checked the bottom of his boot again, raising it up and peeking down.
“What’s wrong?” The landlady said, straightening her back to try and see as well, but not daring to move from her perch.
“I think I might have stepped in some.”
That shut both of them up.
He frowned, partly over the cheap cigarette and partly as he recalled what he’d stepped in just a few moments prior. He hoped it had been tomatoes.
The landlady threw the butt of her smoke into the ashtray. Gen followed, grumbling, “I’ll keep an eye out.”
It was a natural end to their interaction, and he grabbed his pancake, which had been tossed in a plastic bag, on his way out.
As he ducked through the dense maze of old buildings, where portions of the walls were sloughing off in places and each alley was lined with sacks of coal, his frown never seemed to fade.
The ache in his muscles from spending all day at a construction site on the other side of the city had worn him down. He stopped at the open gate of his building and took a generous swig of pseudo-wine.
Gen walked into the traditional-style round doorway, a dented metal door tacked onto it and roped open. Inside was a dark and dusty alley filled with haphazardly parked scooters. His own building was the first one on the right, which he stepped into. It was dark, no lights at all in the hallway. He, and many others, used the lights of their phones to navigate.
There were more papers plastered on the walls here. This time, they offered seedier services. There were mostly numbers for prostitutes, but alongside them was the same hand-written warning with the same picture of the balding man in a long coat. “Thief. Murderer. Please apprehend immediately.”
He fumbled in the darkness with his keys before opening the door to his single-person dormitory.
It was more exhausting just to look around his room. Mold of various shades of blue and black crawled up the walls from each corner, leftover from the sweltering summer and impossible to fight. A thick layer of dust had settled on everything except for his bed and the clothes in his closet. The state of things wasn’t helped by the coal burning only feet away from his window, leaving black soot to blow in through the cracks.
Gen flopped onto the bed, setting the rest of his things onto the floor next to it and taking a few moments to stretch and groan, his spine creaking as he straightened it. He didn’t dare let his feet touch the filthy floor, but kicked his boots off once he’d already settled in.
He drifted off to sleep after only his single swig of wine and not a bite to eat.
He wasn’t certain if he’d fallen asleep at all or how much time had passed. His only thought was that he had to get a blanket over him, though when he peeked up, he saw a figure in the light of the lamps that shined through the window. The smell of mold was still thick and pungent, having overtaken his mostly abandoned belongings.
While most would react with shock or fear, Gen was never the type. Instead, he clicked his tongue as if it were only a mild annoyance. “Who are you? Get outta here,” he grumbled, waving a hand to shoo whoever had crept into his apartment this late at night. The grainy photo flashed into his mind, but he was too tired to fight or argue. If he died, he died.
“I can’t.”
The figure replied in a delicate but masculine voice. It unraveled a scarf from around the bottom of its face, then another, scarf after scarf of all different colors. They draped over his shoulders instead, his face revealed as the tapered ends of the scarves hung in all directions, turning the figure into a bulky beast rather than a slender shadow.
Gen sat up, letting his eyes adjust.
The man standing before him was young, his canvas coat a dark color rather than the pale one that was in the picture, and of course, the colorful scarves stood out.
Gen furrowed his brow.
The figure pointed to the boots on the floor. As his face turned, Gen could see in the dim light that the man’s eye and a portion of his cheek was completely destroyed, replaced by a gooey, bloody mess. His lips were dark as if painted, and he wore makeup on his one remaining eye, a thick layer of red and black. His fluffy brown hair stuck out much the same as the tips of the many scarves around him.
“You stepped on me. Right in my eye,” he griped, though as he went on, he seemed to be speaking in jest, “I’m glad to be out of the dumpster, though this isn’t really much better.” His lips tightened and the brow of his gaping socket raised as he looked around the room. He wasn’t wrong.
Gen scrambled to the edge of his bed, picking up the abandoned boot that stood at the intruder’s feet. Despite his groggy realization that it hadn’t been tomatoes that he’d stepped in, little was at the forefront of his mind but getting some sleep. He inspected the boot and scoffed out, “Damn it.”
Just as he suspected. Despite his scraping, pink goo remained packed inside the nooks of the textured rubber soles. He’d stepped in people-meat.
When Gen looked up again, the guy was squatting on the corner of his dusty desk, pointing and tapping towards his barren eye socket in accusation.
Gen had always considered himself unshakable. He was a reasonable and no-nonsense type of guy, unimpressed by most things, but this was cause for bewilderment. “Get outta here!” he insisted, shooing him away once more.
“I can’t,” he repeated, “I tried already. I tried to get out of the dumpster, too. I’m stuck. I’m Goh, by the way.” He extended a hand, a gesture of camaraderie in the face of his accusations and trespassing.
“Right. Well, you can Goh away. Seeya!” Gen retorted. He reached out to snatch his hand so he could tug the weird little snot off of his desk.
Instead, it sank right through, Goh disappearing in a colorful puff which mimicked the hues of his scarves, red and yellow, green and white. A lingering perfume washed over the scent of mildew in his unexplained disappearance.
“I need you to help me out,” Goh’s voice rang out from behind.
Gen’s chest heaved in a labored sigh as he turned around to locate his plastic shower slippers, still as not to touch the floor. He slipped his feet inside, rubbing his eyes in great annoyance mixed with fleeting disbelief of his situation. “With what?” he scoffed, looking up towards the other man again.
“I need you to help me find the rest of my body.”
“Well, first, I need to find the back of my eyelids.”
Grabbing his only pair of work boots, he was so desperate for sleep that he walked right past— right through Goh, and opened the door to toss them into the hallway in defiance.
Disgruntled and unable to find his way back to sleep, Gen ate his pancake, weighing it in his hand and finding that it was still slightly warm, but more than a little soggy. He must not have slept long. He considered with disdain his two-hour commute and the idea of waking before the sun with the rest of the laborers. The only ones who set out earlier were the ones selling tea eggs and baozi in the dark.
He wondered briefly in his newfound solitude if this was how just anyone would have reacted to the ghost of a bit of meat stuck on their shoe. He silently wondered if he was able to live for working if such an experience was little more on his radar than an inconvenience to his sleep schedule. He didn’t wonder long as he munched his food.
Soon enough, there was a knock at his door. He looked at his watch: midnight. He’d have to wake up in five hours to get to work by eight. He ignored the knocking, though after a moment, Goh poked his head through. “Aren’t you going to answer?” he asked, pouting.
“Nope.”
“Well, I mean, then I’ll probably have to stick around, you know? If I can’t find the rest of my body I’ve got no choice than to stay stuck on your boot.”
“Is that something you know or something you’re threatening me with?”
Gen spoke with his mouth full, shooting a look of disregard towards the disembodied, painted, and one-eyed head hanging through the door.
“It’s just a problem that I need your help solving.”
Gen ignored him. Goh eventually disappeared once more.
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