Six Insurances and Two Funds
Sing Sing climbed back into the van and tossed the manila envelope in his hand onto the passenger seat. It landed right on Toad's knees.
"Open it and take a look."
Mortimer clumsily opened the envelope. Thick calluses covered his finger joints.
They had formed from years of climbing iron ladders in the sewers. Winters in the United States were cold.
The frozen ladders stuck to his hands, and every time he climbed one, he tore off a layer of skin.
Several little booklets and a card slipped out of the envelope.
The card bore a headshot of him, a string of square characters beside the photo, and a red seal at the top.
"This is..."
Mortimer spoke in broken Chinese, his tongue stumbling over the words.
He recognized the photo. It had been taken in the 749 Bureau's basement, after Sing Sing had told him to wash his face and lent him a clean shirt.
The photographer had stood there holding his camera for a long time because Mortimer couldn't stop himself from grinning.
"Your deed of sale... no, wait, your work ID."
Sing Sing turned the steering wheel as they rounded a bend. "Starting today, you're a specially appointed technical adviser for the 749 Bureau's Seventh Urban and Rural Infrastructure Engineering Team. You're on a three-year contract."
Mortimer stared at the card, his vertical pupils contracting.
In New York, the only photo he had was on a wanted poster, pasted to an iron grate at a sewer entrance. The word "monster" was written on it in red ink.
Toad had bent that grate out of shape three times, and each time, someone had nailed up a new wanted poster the next day.
"See that red booklet? That's your social insurance registration certificate. It covers pension, medical, unemployment, work injury, maternity and supplemental medical insurance."
"There's also a housing provident fund and a corporate annuity."
"Do well and you might even get a promotion and a raise. Then you'll have seven insurances and three funds!"
Sing Sing tapped the brakes and turned his head to remind him, "You probably won't need maternity insurance, but the rules say we have to pay for the whole package."
Toad held the cards and little red booklets in both hands, which trembled uncontrollably.
Magneto had promised to build a Mutant Utopia.
He had believed him.
Later, he had been sent to blow up the X-Men's aircraft. Magneto had said it was "fighting for our kind."
The aircraft had exploded, and the blast had caught him too, flinging him into the Hudson River. But Magneto hadn't bothered with him at all.
The X-Men had said they advocated peaceful coexistence.
He had believed them too.
Once, he had worked up the courage to block an attack for them, but passersby had still thrown stones at him.
Their words had sounded nicer than songs.
They had never given Mortimer benefits that would reimburse him for hospital treatment.
Two streams of murky tears rolled from Mortimer's eyes.
He remembered that winter night in New York again, the day he'd been thrown out of his home and had nowhere to go.
He could only curl up under a bridge, so hungry he licked pizza boxes in a trash can.
When people cursed at him, he hadn't dared move, because moving would earn him another kick.
Back then, Mortimer had thought, This is probably all my life will ever be.
I'll die in the sewers and rot into sludge, and nobody will know.
"Don't wipe your snot on my genuine leather seat covers! I paid eighty yuan for those!"
Sing Sing cursed as he tossed him a pack of tissues.
Lao Mo, I want to eat fish
He saw Toad crying with his face crumpled, tensed his jaw, and lowered the window a crack.
Wind rushed in from outside, dispersing the fishy smell in the van.
"Hold it in, now! Once we get to the site tomorrow, work your ass off for me!"
Mortimer pressed the documents to his chest and nodded hard.
He opened his mouth, wanting to say something, but his tongue wouldn't cooperate.
He'd forgotten all the square characters he'd memorized on the plane. In the end, he could only force out a sentence in badly accented Chinese:
"Someone... wants... me."
Sing Sing didn't answer. He rolled up the window and started the van.
The van continued into the mountains. Its undercarriage scraped a few more times, but he didn't curse again.
The next day, Tiankeng Village.
The terrain was even more treacherous than Director Wang had described.
Steep, vertical karst cliffs rose on all four sides. The sinkhole's bottom, more than three hundred meters across, was pitch-black, like a giant mouth ready to swallow people.
Local legend said a dragon lived down there.
The construction crew's rows of prefab cabins with colored steel roofs stood on the only patch of level ground halfway up the mountain.
The project manager, Lao Liu, wore a hard hat and squatted in the mud, smoking in silence. Cigarette butts lay thickly scattered around his feet.
A third of his hair had gone gray since he started working at this site.
It had rained the night before, and another layer of the rubble temporarily piled by the cliff had slid down, nearly burying an excavator's tracks.
"Engineer Liu, some of the expansion bolts on that section of cliff have come loose. The weathering cracks are a full palm's width wide," a junior foreman said in a low voice, coming over.
Lao Liu ground his cigarette butt hard into the mud. "We'll reinforce it when the shifts change this afternoon. For now, keep the guys away from that section."
Before he could give any more instructions, a mud-covered van bumped up the dirt road.
Sing Sing got out, leading someone wrapped up from head to toe.
Lao Liu stood, brushed the mud off his legs, and went to meet them.
"Comrade Zhou, right? The higher-ups said they were sending a specialist in working at heights. Is this him?"
Toad was wearing an extra-large, loose-fitting set of camouflage fatigues today, with a helmet and windproof goggles on his head and a sun-protection mask over his face. Not a single strand of hair was showing.
"Manager Liu, pleased to meet you."
Sing Sing stepped forward to shake his hand and slipped a pack of Chunghwa cigarettes into it.
Lao Liu looked down, saw that it was a soft pack, and hastily waved it away.
But Sing Sing went ahead and tucked it into his pocket.
"This is Lao Mo, a model worker in specialized high-altitude operations from the northwest. He can't be exposed to the wind, and his skin isn't in great shape, so please bear with him."
Lao Liu felt the cigarettes in his pocket, sighed, and pointed at the sheer cliff opposite them. "Brother Lao Mo, I'm not trying to make things difficult for you. See that cliffside road? We blasted an opening in it, and now we need to put in channel steel for support."
"Machinery can't get in there, so we have to lower men on safety ropes to drill holes with pneumatic picks. The rock is badly weathered, and bits keep falling off while they work. Two men were injured just last month."
"Especially that section. See that pale layer of rock halfway up the cliff? It came loose again last night. The crack's three fingers wider than before..."
He sized Mortimer up again. "Can you do it? If you can't, don't force yourself. We'll find another way."
Mortimer said nothing.
Toad pulled the tool bag off his back and strode toward the cliff's edge.
He hadn't attached a safety rope.
The move stunned several workers nearby who were putting on their harnesses.
The cigarette fell from a young laborer's mouth, and he shouted, "Hey! You there! Have you got a death wish?"
Lao Liu's eyes widened, and he took two steps after him. "Why aren't you hooking up a rope? If someone dies, I can't take responsi—"
Before he could finish, the sound of metal snapping came from up on the cliff.
High in the air, a large section of rock suddenly collapsed beneath Lao Li, a worker clearing away loose stones.
It was exactly the spot Lao Liu had pointed to, where "the crack's three fingers wider than before."
The expansion bolt anchoring his safety rope was ripped out, along with hundreds of pounds of rock.
The bolt scraped against the cliff face, throwing a spark.
"Fuck! Save him!"