Fan Bing Bing Sucks Off The Boogeyman
As I click to download Lost in Beijing, I hear a bitch whisper, “The opacity of the system…” Sitting up in my hospital bed, I shift my gaze, see that the ward’s corridors are empty, save for a nursebot beeping down the hallway.
Terror swarms my mind, and I get sudden chills as if an ice cube is sliding down my spine. My skin starts crawling as I sense wild tigers congregating, the animals readying to run roughshod through the hospital, crash through the maternity ward’s doors. Fucking eat babies alive.
I suck in a series of deep, healing breaths. Then I steady myself and swipe to watch an instructional video about how to survive a tiger attack. Covering my phone’s screen are intrusive ads for books concerning “Xi Jinping Thought.” Then I receive a text from an unknown number, saying to “go kick rocks.” My phone then becomes a big sticky bar of chocolate melting in my hands.
I knew what to do.
I rip off my gown and IVs, wires, causing a prolonged beep. Then I lift out of the hospital bed, assume a crane kick pose, and with gusto I shriek, pivot, and jump kick the air. Then I teleport to a pastoral landscape. On an infinite gravel road. I’m in a tiger print pressure suit and running on all fours under a blazing sun. The rocky ground is scorching, hissing under me. It’s like I’m running on hot coals. The sun’s charring my helmet. A river rushes nearby.
A clear glass-windowed slaughterhouse pushes up from the ground, jutting tall as a mountain before me. In It, I see workers in space suits hacking at carcasses and assembly lines of boars and tigers being felled one by one. The slaughterhouse smells of livestock and the muddy grounds ringing it are sloppy, wet…. I rise to enter…
I hear glass shattering. Through an exploding cloud of debris comes a clown car, the size of a Smart car, crashing down from the second storey of the slaughterhouse. The clown car blaps down to the muck before me. Its tinny engine dying with a cough. Swarms of doctors, all in white lab coats, stream from the clown car’s doors, climb from its trunk and out from under its hood.
The doctors’ faces are severe. Furious. The doctors’ faces crumpled and full of deeply etched lines. The doctors’ saggy faces rising and falling as they form a circle around me and start chanting the name of the fallen movie star “Fan Bing Bing.”
Each of the doctors is lighting, smoking cigarettes. The doctors’ circle moving as closely as possible without forming a mass. Behind the doctors appears a flickering hologram that reads: “Hot Water”
Then I see why the doctors are chanting Fan Bing Bing’s name. The disgraced movie star appears in a halo of gold, descending from the clear blue sky like a fallen angel. Her gorgeous face is halved by a toothy, beaming smile and her teeth are straight and ivory as piano keys.
Flanking Fan Bing Bing is a battalion of dancing grandmas, falling from the sky, about 50 of them, in tiger print pajamas.
Fan Bing Bing is in frilly black lace lingerie. A nimbus of long, frizzy, jet-black hair frames her deep black eyes, and her eyes shimmer, are resplendently aglitter, shadowed in gold, sparkling heavenly in the hot sun. Landing softly, she stands tall on all ten toes, firm in the muck, and turns her sweet smile toward me as she shines with a celestial, eternal joy.
But I sense pain in Bing Bing’s popping eyes. They are eyes of agony. And I marvel at the curl, the set of Fan Bing Bing’s cherry lips that remain stretched to smile.
“In a land where the government outlaws God, Google, crypto, witchcraft and sorcery, what’s left to lose?” Fan Bing Bing inquires, lifting her plucked, crescent-shaped eyebrows, and behind her is a wild-eyed doctor with a leather whip, the doctor chasing after and lashing a dancing grandma.
Fan Bing Bing nods, then gigantic, pillar-sized cigarettes shoot up from the earth, like stalagmites, and form a Stonehenge-like circle around the doctors’ circle.
Another doctor crawls up from the muddy ground, like a corpse escaping the grave. The doctor with broken fingernails, a long, greasy black ponytail, and unsightly patches of facial hair, almost like a leper. The doctor lurching in a threadbare, dirty lab coat. The doctor raising his gnarled hand, holding up and thrusting forward a tattered copy of Xi Jinping Thought. The book appearing smeared with spackles of shit.
Then more doctors trudge forth, break the circle, jump up and down. Bing Bing’s face thickens to a scowl as many of the jumping doctors sink and disappear into the muck.
Fan Bing Bing’s cherry lips stretch into an even bigger smile and she chortles, “the hidey hole of both propaganda and effective altruism.”
My mind blazing, Fan Bing Bing pours more poison in my ears. Tells me telepathically that she knows these doctors are compromised. The doctors’ brains are full of bugs. Their beds full of bugs. Bugs crawling into the doctors’ ears, noses. Bugs in the buttocks. But Fan Bing Bing’s been setting bug traps, practicing a Parthian Shot.
The doctors are joined by the dancing grandmas and they form a tight circle around me and Fan Bing Bing. Start to clap. Chant. The grannies shouting Cultural Revolution slogans. The grandmas’, doctors’ eyes red as traffic lights. Then they sweat profusely. Sheens of perspiration, sweat spreading, lines of liquid wetting their lab coats, tiger print pajamas.
Fan Bing Bing hears and knows. The dancing grandmas. The doctors. Their blotched faces, tremulous cheeks. Their ugliest deeds and dreams. The sunshine and darkness intertwined, locked in their heads, tangling in their souls.
Bing Bing knows high rises, living on balconies. Barbecuing civet cats on a hibachi grill. Buying a new Bugatti just to set it on fire… Burning paper money and paper iPhones… Black-tooth doctors on made-up holidays, atop weird buildings, emptying buckets of piss and shit on square-dancing grandmas… Belt and Road debt trap diplomacy…
Fan Bing Bing knows…
Bing Bing knows doctors, like cadres, speak in acronyms and long yawns. Yes, Bing Bing detests the doctors’ handwriting, the sound of their karaoke, but is awash, adrift in their oceans of knowledge. After all, she too exists in a lingering mist. Today’s Fan Bing Bing no longer exists only at glittering, curvilinear angles.
The grandmas’ primal screams, the doctors’ claps reach a thundering applause and drown out the tigers’ roars, boars’ groans and incessant death clangs of the slaughterhouse.
Bing Bing seizes up. Her cheeks flush, her forehead reddens. Her eyes are red-rimmed. Her heart fluttering like a vulture’s wings. Her breasts heave. Her bony knees tatter. Her whole soul possessed by the retired Red Guards’ gut-wrenching cries, the doctors’ applause. Shedding distorted tears, Fan Bing Bing begins to melt like a candle.
The doctors’ skins shift to silver, blue, and the applause hushes, as Fan Bing Bing and then the grandmas dissolve into clear puddles of gasoline in the muck. The slaughterhouse beginning to stink like a gas station.
Then the doctors, like a Greek chorus, warn of Chairman Xi Jinping’s successor. The successor, the heir to the Dragon Throne will be a King, they lament. A mighty King to be reckoned with. A King like a God. A sixty-five-foot-tall Chairman to be feared, loathed.
My mind working into overdrive, I jump into the air, ascending like a basketball player readying to dunk. I’m flying away as the slaughterhouse bursts into a ball of fire and the doctors are kicking, punching, tipping over the stalagmite cigarettes, the stalagmites falling faster than dominoes. Then I see the doctors, big as ants, igniting into phosphorescent flames like the lit gas burners of a stovetop.
Further on I fly, the hot day melting into a dank, sweltering evening, and I’m soon soaring into a more remote darkness, furthering into a windy, moonless night. Then I see red dots in the distance, like fireflies in the dark.
A metropolis on the horizon is spreading out before me. Its downtown skyline looming through a line of haze; its skyscrapers flashing like lights under ice. Infinite rows of neon-lit towers blinking through the hazy expanse.
A booming, computerized bitch voice suddenly speaks from the sky. “Blood on the hands that’ll never wash off… Jeremiads in the Global Times are just waxing whimsical… The opacity of the system is intentional… Everyone on Weibo knows…” The computerized voice then disappears, is swallowed into the smoggy night. Then an immense, funneling cloud from a nearby smokestack practically blindfolds me, leaving me unseeing.
I dip, descend to street level, where I again encounter Fan Bing Bing.
“Crucify! Crucify the cunt!” cries Bing Bing. Fan Bing Bing, true to her words, is crucifying a dead bat to a shuttered SARS2 testing booth. Bing Bing, ever the Impaler, hammering the creature’s tiny skull with the tip of a high-heel shoe and a golden nine-inch nail.
Bing Bing grins. Her head twisting, like an owl, to a 180-degree angle. Bing Bing putting her face parallel to her back. Then she makes eye contact with me and says, plainly, “Crucifixion breaks the spirit of even the darkest flowers.”
Her voice lacks any intentional callousness, and through this, a passcode cracks.
“Doomsday prepping Mojiang for more crucifixions, I see…” I reply, ready to skulk off to the shadows. Then I skip my way down an empty side street. Only a robot street cleaner is small in the distance. Saliva starts pooling in my mouth as I smell woodsmoke and chestnuts roasting.
“Mojiang is where the future King of China went to confer with astrology. Where he ate tiger penis hot dogs and drank bat blood. There, Bing Bing can manufacture astrolabes. Practice nighttime passages. Hatch schemes to enhance the opacity of the system, prep for clandestine asset seizures. Get her good name back,” I hear a bitch whisper.
“Fan Bing Bing might have been tattling on dissidents, greeting government guys with handjobs instead of handshakes. And maybe she was hiding wild boars in the janitor closets of the Jade Buddha Temple. But she swears she won’t ever again be taken down a peg, not simply due to tax fraud. And she’ll be nothing like the pangolin breeders… Spiders that eat each other in a jar…”
But nothing could exactly augur what Fan Bing Bing would encounter in Mojiang, a bitch could surmise. Up until her demise, on account of a highly public tax fraud ordeal, Bing Bing had lived a successful life and had never seen so many ants in a maze. The masses she knew were unknowing. Only the occasional kinesis. Only hearty laughs and butt slaps…. But only Fan Bing Bing’s blood in the petri dish could truly enhance the system’s opacity…
“Follow the money!” I bellow, my pressure suit’s boots still blackened with muck. Then I dash, running angrily as a rugby player. Then I halt to practice the animal attack video’s defensive maneuvers, practice kicking away a wild tiger. But instead I knock over a curbside card game, enraging a pack of pot-bellied, flat-topped, shirtless middle-aged Chinese men in jorts.
The men are agog, scream bloody murder, and chase me for a block or two before running out of breath. The men hacking, spitting, and wheezing, and their bombastic words, caustic shouts, fade into the sticky night like plumes of cigarette smoke lifting into the sky.
“Medusa, Peng Shuai in my thoughts and my prayers,” I mutter through clenched teeth, dash down a side street. Then I stumble unto a garbage dump fronting a bay. The bay’s waters curiously pinkish, practically the color of a dog’s belly.
There, I set sail in a garbage can full of freshly cut body parts, fashioning Fan Bing Bing’s most elegant evening dress as a sail. Then I plow into a harnessed fog, rowing the boat with a severed arm.
A bitch whispers, “I’d have more than imagined Bing Bing to be a maiden truckling to social harmony.”
“But that was back before, pre-SARS2… Before the backdoor deals with barbarians and the collection of wild boars. Before Bing Bing was known to run on all fours by the Bund… Fucking police, polite society had never seen a movie star licking and biting the proletariat and bourgeois alike…”
Bing Bing is again with me. Riding shotgun in our garbage can junker.
“Success was red. It was the Chinese Dream. A chimerical, secondhand concept. We had such prosaic thoughts. We were ambulatory, plodding, and answering signs,” I shriek at Bing Bing, who remains a hand hiding a face.
“You climbed the wall, Bing Bing. Your camera phone had circular eyes, bunched balls of knowing. But who is watching YOU through that phone camera? Who is listening to you, through your phone’s holes? Was it really the PSB? Or was it Mark Zuckerberg, all along, dressed like a raccoon? Your internet, your phone’s lights speak another language,” I continue, still failing to register even an inkling, let alone a wave of emotion.
“But the messages…” Bing Bing finally retorts, and she slaps herself in the face three times. Right hand to left cheek.
“The messages required recondite signals, paronomasia, and ellipses lingering. The messages were littered with loaded questions, strawman social justice and interpolated food photos.” I answer. Bing Bing’s eyes retain a childish limpidity, her bloody lips redder than wine.
Bing Bing harumphs, averts my gaze and mutters something about, “WeChat might as well be ransomware… It’s intentional…” and then keeps silent.
We dock our garbage can junker at an archipelago made of hard, crunchy plastic.
A large sign hanging from a fake palm tree reads, “No Commiserating Anywhere on the Archipelago.”
“Noted,” I concur, helping Bing Bing out of the garbage can.
Bing Bing has shed her bra and panties due to new laws in China governing women modeling lingerie. Her nude, lean, hourglass form is flawless. Not a wrinkle, tube of fat, cellulite patch or any imperfection in sight.
Noticing my ogling, Bing Bing clucks and her eyeballs turn black as a tar road. “Perfection is an imperfection,” Bing Bing chuckles and feints a crane kick.
We run up the promontory of the archipelago, arriving at a jungle. The swampy air stinks like burning plastic, and the bay’s breezes freshen and bite, turn hot as an oven. Then the sky darkens deeper as thunderheads rumble in. The thunderclouds full of silvery vapors shining like freshly cut jewels.
“Fucking monsoon season,” I grumble.
A stuffed, dead elephant at the entrance of the sweat-dripping jungle had been spray-painted with the warning: “No Empaths Allowed in the Jungle.”
“Laissez faire,” Bing Bing retorts.
We’re met at the jungle’s entrance sign by a deathly pale eunuch in a red robe emblazoned with golden dragons. He’s tattooed to the ears and appears hairless as a dolphin. His bald head bright as a crystal ball. His hook-shaped eyes are translucent. They are eyes filled with souls and transmigrations. He begins to tell us of blood magic, superstitions, rumors, luck and Xi Jinping Thought. Such an approach is emblematic of the jungle’s eunuch policy.
To Bing Bing it’s predictable as a simulation. Hack, spit, smile. Smile and bitch dance. Rinse and repeat.
Up to 6 times per day. Morning readings. Reciting Xi Jinping Thought. Squat, shit on the floor, blame all ills on Western Imperialism…
“Euphonic grunts, invisible anthills… shapes and sizes, sweet tastes and fragrant smells. Salt and soap. Caramel and dirt. Opium, gunpowder, fentanyl and fireworks. Rinse and repeat,” and I understand an unusual symmetry in the eunuch’s eyes.
The eunuch finds from Fan Bing Bing that Xi Jinping’s successor has yet to be chosen and that the Chairman had been cloned and had crafted his own archipelago.
“Artificial islands in the South China Sea were just the start…”
The Chairman and his bloated, constipation face, his laughing to burn. His largesse joking the core. “It’s a gas!” screams the eunuch.
The eunuch slashes the sky with a “woot, woot!” and tells us the Chairman probably sent a flying panda head to follow us from above, “like TikTok, the stars or the moon.”
“Chairman knows best,” quips Bing Bing to the eunuch. “What we thought was a star peeking through that sloppy sky could actually be the Chairman’s flying panda head.”
“After all, a flying panda head is harder to spot than any spy balloon.”
“And quieter than dissidents, or the bitch whisperer.”
We then see there’s a gaping hole in Bing Bing’s chest, right where her left tit used to be. But before I can ask anything, Bing Bing is lifting into the air and jetting off like Iron Man. Bing Bing vanishing fast, a funnel of fumes shooting from her ass, forming into a glittery chemtrail. Bing Bing an itty bitty speck in the night sky.
“Tits, dicks, chips, ships and a tech war…”
“The smart money is always on tits…”
Bing Bing has anger, Baidu, The Great Firewall and hurricane lights to guide her. Whenever she’d escape her cave, she’d drink bat blood mixed with baijiu, run on all fours through the countryside. Or she’d hit the jungle. Or Shanghai. Where she’d walk along the Bund for hours, aimlessly, in meditation. Bing Bing watching light beam off skyscrapers… Or Bing Bing could play urban golf, in Pudong, with a severed arm and a dead cockroach… Or go for jungle cricket, watching stars aglitter in the trees, swatting mosquitoes with camera sticks… Or she’d dress like a whore, prostrate at the Jade Buddha Temple, imploring the Chairman not to apply tax laws, to overlook currency violations, and to truly enhance the system’s opacity…
Bing Bing reappears, rockets from out of the bay, like a submarine. Then she hovers above the pinkish water’s surface, shouts, “The opacity of the system is WHAT?”
“Intentional!” I rejoin, shouting with the intensity of a soldier. Then the sky opens. A deluge dropping from the heavens, fat raindrops of pure gasoline spattering the jungle’s marshy ground.
“Grandpa Mao in the shower…” the eunuch spasms, bellows. His face a mask of fear. His stocky body, his wealth belly convulsing as his fingers and toes shapeshift into lit cigarettes.
Then the archipelago, jungle shake, boom, and burst into a blaze of flames…
Bing Bing’s left tit grows back, faster than microwave popcorn, and she scoffs, leaves the eunuch for dead. But me and her teleport. Then run the streets of Shanghai, blood dripping from her painted, Freddy Krueger fingernails.
“Blood on the hands that’ll never wash off…” Bing Bing chortles.
As we run under the neon lights of Nanjing Road, Bing Bing slashes throats and gouges the eyes of cripples, beggars, tea touts and random scammers. Then she stops and stabs a cigarette-smoking traffic cop. Gouges the fucker’s eyeballs. But she goes unseen as a ghost due to her invisibility. After all, she is a fallen star. Fan Bing Bing fucking free as oxygen!
Bing Bing brings me to a public bathroom. “Let’s meet the bitch whisperer,” laughs Bing Bing. Her laughs hit my ears like cleansing immolations, and she cuts a bloody smile into her lips while staying invisible.
“Four visits of New Year’s Past. Ghosts. Pigs, Snakes and an Ox. A Rat… Pandora’s Box… Everyone on Weibo knows the opacity of the system,” utters Bing Bing, her lovely head thrown back, her black hair a blur, her cherry lips lip-syncing plans to recreate the MH370 disappearance.
That was it, she knows. She knows the burn. The tax on Wealth. The preparations for the tech war. The hoarding of minerals and blood, the mine shafts. The moles in Taiwan. Fan Bing Bing throws up honey and circles paper plane crashes. She has inflamed, scatterbrain, paper-fuselage bitch dreams. SHE knows. Fan Bing Bing knows. It is written in her eyes. She’s told of investments, bitch dance hoaxes, population control, kindergarten stabbing sprees, contaminated milk products and family planning. It is all glowered, compendious in her deep eyes, her eyes black and slick as oil.
Cupping her hands around her mouth, she shouts, “Return. Return to Bing Bing! Arise! Make your presence known!!!!”
Xiao Gege crawls up from out of the drain of a squat toilet. He emerges rambling, confesses to enjoying diarrhea. And practicing sodomy with his sister. But never full-on sex. Everyone on Weibo knows he lives in the cheapest real estate in Shanghai. In a dookie booth. In a public bathroom. Next to the septic tank.
Xiao Gege wears women’s hanfu and dyes his hair neon green. Everyone on Weibo knows his sister lets him out, like a geek in a freakshow, so he can perform his bitch dance. And only on Tuesdays does he release and chase after one or two of Bing Bing’s wild boars. Xiao Gege climbing façades of commercial buildings, running on all fours through Pudong in reckless pursuit.
“Bitch clans of the future. Tarot cards and face licks. Bitches handcuffed on the news. Call center bitch gangs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology!”
Bing Bing gasps. Her brother’s unpatriotic, unharmonious words stealing through her with the force of an accusation.
Xiao Gege screams gibberish at the bathroom floor. It’s smeared with shit. He’d been reaching into toilets and writing Xi Jinping Thought in feces again. Everyone on Weibo knows.
“Smile, remember the kneeling bitches,” shrieks Xiao Gege, blood rising to his face. He then hums, slaps and drums the national anthem on his sister’s butt.
Conjoined twin doctors, in a wide white lab coat, ride into the bathroom on a wild boar. The conjoined twin doctors smoking cigarettes and demanding a blowjob and a truth slap by Bing Bing. Bing Bing happily obliges, diamonds glinting in her eyes.
“The hacked cameras. The hacked cameras! 7-year bitch! A jokey joke! Just a jokey joke on a blog!” Xiao Gege guffaws.
“Reeducation,” retorts Bing Bing, nonchalant, as she drops to her knees, unzips each conjoined twin’s slacks, fishes out their identical hard, hook-shaped penises.
Xiao Gege, the geek runs circles around us. The geek giggling while watching his sister suck off, gulp, swallow each doctor’s cum. Bing Bing slurps, smiles and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand after each load.
Then Bing Bing lifts up from her knees and open-hand smacks both twins in the forehead, shapeshifting the doctors’ conjoined body into a small camera, about the size of a gecko lizard.
Bing Bing crouches, scoops up the camera, rises and inspects it. Wrinkles her nose. Throws the cam to the bathroom floor. Stomps on it as if it were a bug. All this with her tiny barefoot.
“Smashing the camera is ending its lies,” shrieks Xiao Gege, the geek jumping like a caged monkey.
Laughing, Bing Bing collects the camera’s pieces, tosses them into a squat toilet. Then her left arm spins like a helicopter propellor, and she claws at her brother’s forehead, carves “清楚.” Then her brother bitch dances, seemingly entranced by his wound, his blood’s warmth.
“The opacity of the system is intentional,” declares Bing Bing as she kneels before me.
