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.