Of course, after I wrapped up my nightly chores, I hurried down familiar streets, past hawkers and holy men and sightseers, to the bar, where Boss was teaching a focused Little Cancer to mix drinks.
I stood by, transfixed, as the two poured and amalgamated various alcohols and sodas and juices. Little Cancer hunched over the glasses and bottles, pouring and measuring ever so carefully like a mad scientist with a mission relying on exactness. Boss kept smiling, telling him to loosen up a bit, but, in truth, he didn’t appear to mind the attention to detail.
“Here,” Boss said, finally verbally acknowledging me, breaking the spell and handing me a glass. “Try this. It’s an old-fashioned.”
I sniffed the syrupy concoction. I drew it to my lips and took a measured sip. My gag reflex kicked in and I panicked, desperate to spit it out. I can only imagine the face I must have been making—both Boss and Little Cancer burst out laughing.
I swallowed, fire in my throat, and then laughed too. “First time,” I squeaked, and not wanting to make a fool of myself or to make an unintended statement about Little Cancer’s skills, I sipped again and forced a grin.
They included me in the remainder of their lesson, and that’s how I learned to tend bar. Many mixtures and sips later, we collapsed in an overstuffed booth in the corner. Boss talked, slurring a bit, about his grand plans, about the bands he hoped to bring in, about his eventual dream of operating a record label, of bringing Tibetan rock to the world. The room spun. I tried my best to listen but his words sounded far away, as though he were speaking into cupped hands and not out into the open world.
Little Cancer laid his face to rest on the table, snored, mumbled, sighed.
“Should we—” I motioned toward him, thinking maybe it’d be best to get him to bed, thinking fondly too of my own bed, how nice it’d feel to shut my eyes, to drift away.
But Boss shook his head. “He’s fine. Just let him rest a bit.” He was silent for a moment, his gaze traveling the brick wall, and then he said, “I don’t expect you to tell me why you’re only a half-monk or your life story or any of that, but I do want to ask your opinion on something, okay?”
I nodded. Sure.
“Do you think that owning a bar makes me a bad Buddhist?” Before I could respond, he chuckled. “Oh, boy. That hardly sounds intellectual, does it? Like praying to god about hairstyles or something. Okay, let me rephrase that: Do you think that there are other ways to show reverence and other paths to enlightenment besides just living some monastic, closed-off life?”
I peered through one of the glasses on the tabletop. Everything was distorted through it, too tall or too short. “Yeah,” I said. “I hope so.”
It was his turn to nod. “Yeah, I like to hope so too.” He stole a sip from the glass I’d been peering through and stared firmly ahead at that brick wall. “I’m going to tell you something about myself that I’ve never told anyone.”
I am a man who has studied holy things, but we all know by now that I’m not a holy man. Ha, and if we are going to be honest, let’s be clear too: I never was a man, only ever a boy. And now I’m just a turtle.
I say that to say this: Why Little Cancer and Boss felt the need to offer up their confessions to me, their stories, I don’t know. I’m worthy of no one’s secrets; I feel that still.
Allow me now to confess all of my indiscretions, the sins that made me unworthy: Impure thoughts. Looking at racy pictures of women on the Internet. Masturbation. Materialism. Harboring anger at my mother for abandoning me, at my sister for not sending for me to join them in Chengdu. Jealousy. Longing. Listening to music that advocated drug use—loud, raucous music that did little to quiet my mind…
Oh, as for my sins, I could go on and on…
Boss took another sip, set the glass down, cleared his throat. “Okay, so there’s this Nirvana song—old school, but they’re my favorite rock band—that goes, The animals I’ve trapped have all become my pets… something in the way, mmm…”
I hummed along. I knew the one.
“So I was in the backseat of a taxi one afternoon, back in Beijing. That song, I’d heard it a million times before, but it came through my headphones then and something happened.
“Have you heard of synesthesia? Like when people have crossed wires or extra connections between their senses, hearing colors or tasting sounds or whatever? Well, it was kind of like that, but beyond that. Bigger.
“I was still sitting there, my ass firmly planted on the Volkswagen seat, but I was also outside. I was everywhere, everything. I was the mirrored glass in the skyscrapers, those red banners urging us to be patriotic, the traffic lights, girls’ hair, bicycle wheels, the road, the other cars, everything. I should only have been able to feel air-conditioning and to smell the eau de toilette of the taxi, you know, tobacco and body odor and what have you. That’s it. But I could feel, actually feel, the crush of traffic on my body, and I smelled broth boiling in distant restaurants, saw what was happening in each and every one of those buildings, tasted the meat of the pigeons that congregated on the sidewalk, heard strangers’ whispers and thoughts and heartbeats…
“And that song. Something in the way.
“When it first happened, I guess I was frozen in shock. But I snapped out of it quickly. My entire body felt numb, misassembled. I thought I must have died. I gnawed on my lip and pinched the skin on my hands. Pain receptors fired.
“I screamed. The driver glanced up at me in the rearview mirror, but didn’t open his mouth. I ripped the headphones off, rolled down the window, and hurled my iPod out. Some guy at a bus stop scurried over to the road’s shoulder, grabbed it, and ran off. Good fucking riddance.
“But now I want it back. Not the iPod, I mean… that feeling. I wasn’t ready for it then—who literally throws a spiritual experience out the window?—and I’m probably still not ready now, but I’m—I’m obsessed.
“That feeling, I want it back for a second, a millisecond, I don’t care. That’s all I want. And it’s connected to music somehow, I know it. The portal or whatever it was I slipped into. I tried listening to that song again, went back to the exact place in another taxi, tried everything, but nothing. Nothing.” He clenched and unclenched his fists, wiped his palms on his pants, traced a character into his glass’s condensation. “Mmm, I don’t even know why I told you that. It makes me sound like a lunatic. Whatever. Anyway, I am going to go check out a band tomorrow after lunch. They live in an apartment not far from your monastery, in fact. Supposed to be pretty talented. We’d have them come over here, but the sound equipment won’t be delivered and set up until Tuesday.”
Drowsy from the alcohol and from the soothing rhythm of Little Cancer’s snores, I found myself nodding.
“So, great, we’ll check them out tomorrow then.”
I nodded again, and then, flustered, I shook my head. “Actually, I can’t.”
I filled him in briefly about the details of my situation—my obligations at the monastery.
He listened, a twinkle in his eyes and a twitch in his lips, antsy to counter. As soon as I finished, he said, “I own the upstairs here too. That’s where Little Cancer and I stay. There are extra beds. Forget that place. Stay here. Work here.”
I instinctively opened my mouth to protest—but protest what?
“What I don’t understand,” Lulu said, “is why some Nirvana-listening rich boy from Beijing would go to Lhasa to fulfill a dream of operating a successful bar. Surely there are more happening places in the world with better scenes.” She thought of the clubs around the city, around Beijing, where in her short-lived acting days she’d danced away many nights, leaving with a nauseated stomach and hair that reeked of smoke. She thought of all the clubs around the world that she’d seen in movies and on the Internet—in Tokyo, in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Seoul—clubs she would go see for herself if only she could work up the motivation, the drive, the desire to do so. “I mean, if he wanted to start a record label and become some big shot on t
he nightlife scene, why wouldn’t he start somewhere a little more—”
“Yeah, I don’t get it either,” Zhang Li interrupted. Though she didn’t have any experience in nightclubs, one of her classmates had traveled to Tibet on a tour, bringing back some yak snacks and tales of altitude headache halos. Based on her own limited knowledge, she told Lulu, Tibet was hardly synonymous with rock ’n’ roll.
The turtle shut his eyes for a moment, considering, soaking in their doubts. “I didn’t understand either at first. But here’s what he told me…”
That afternoon, after a solid night of sleep above the bar and a dull morning headache, as Boss and I walked to find our band, he addressed these whys and hows…
“I grew up in Beijing, a typical urban son of the nineties, never wanting for anything. I was a below-average student, but my parents accrued enough wealth that it didn’t matter. I scored poorly on my university entrance exams, but they paid my way into a private university.
“Most days I could barely drag myself to class. At eighteen, I was far more interested in girls and beer and partying than in listening to dull lectures in mildewy rooms. Go figure. And because my parents set me up with a generous monthly allowance, a sleek car, and an apartment, and maybe too because of my looks, I never had trouble making well-connected friends. Regular nights at the club found me falling into a group of wannabe models and other beautiful, bored entertainment types. Though I typically only heard from these friends after nightfall, one afternoon, a young woman from the film academy, the daughter of a very rich businessman, called up, asked if I’d be interested in playing a role in her thesis film. I’d never acted before, but I said sure, because who wouldn’t say yes to that?
“Anyway, she sent me the script, and weeks later, we were shooting in a bar in Houhai. I played a lovable gangster with a gambling problem who had to ask his father, the big gangster, for a loan to pay for his girlfriend’s abortion. The film was very arty, philosophical, false. Full of the kind of glamour that only the rich can find in grit. Utter crap if you ask me, but, regardless, it got noticed. Unfortunately for this friend, it wasn’t her directing or writing that garnered the attention. It was—and I’m embarrassed to say this now, but it’s the truth—it was me.
“So, to the feigned disappointment of my mother, my half-assed university career creaked to a halt. I landed a regular role in a soap opera, playing a ladies’ man, a Don Juan. A couple of other small roles followed. The TV shows didn’t pay much, but they led to commercial work, which did.
“And oh boy, I really thought I was hot shit. I bought ridiculous clothes, devoured filet mignon and sea cucumbers like they were going out of fashion, had a different girl on my arm and in my bed every weekend. And then there were the substances, oh, the sweet, sweet substances. I was almost always shit-faced. Drunk. High as hell. Snorting horse tranquilizers off nightclub tabletops and popping whatever pills anyone would place in my palm.
“So I was off my face as usual one morning, riding along in the passenger seat of my friend’s Porsche. We dawdled in traffic, talking about nothing. We had nowhere to be and nothing to say. I glanced out the window at one point, an innocent enough glance, except that it wasn’t. Staring back at me, bigger than the face I was looking from, was my face, all blown up on the side of a bus with a goose’s face next to it. An ad for the Bashful Goose Snack Company.
“Panic. Pure panic. I couldn’t remember even hearing about, much less participating in that photo shoot. My friend removed his foot from the brake, laughed dismissively, and assured me I’d agreed to it and done it.
“The light changed and we sailed onward. Traffic’s tides eased up, and my friend gunned it, taking sharper and sharper turns. I buckled my seat belt and frantically dialed my accountant, who confirmed everything. Where were my memories going? Was someone stealing them? Who was I and who was that face on the side of a city bus?
“I spent the next three days at home, in and out of consciousness, swallowing pills and swigging whiskey and vomiting and doing it all over again. I’d been cut from sanity’s anchor, set adrift, flying a flag that read, ‘Who am I if I can’t remember what I’ve done?’
“I was a terrible son, flippant and out of touch, so I didn’t expect my parents to notice anything amiss, but you’d think that my disappearing off the face of the earth might spark some concern among those friends of mine. In moments of lucidity, I listened for a knock, checked for an imploring e-mail or text message, listened for my phone’s once-familiar ring.
“But there were other handsome minor celebrities with drugs to snort and money to burn out there, not drowning in themselves. There were hundreds of more functional messes.
“Those awful days stretched on like years, but somehow, through no miracle or moment of clarity, I began to pull myself together. Slowed down. Stopped going out every single night. Started putting money into a savings account. Hell, I even attempted an actual relationship with an amiable, responsible girl—it only lasted a few months, sure, but it was progress.
“Above all else, in these slowed-down months, I focused on maintaining my memory. I practiced recalling events, sequences—going through everything I’d done that day step-by-step, retracing my thoughts back to their roots. I tried to remember how to say certain words in English, and I taught myself the French words for various actions and household objects—just to have something new to remember. Time passed and I was finally able to trust in my memory again, and life was looking up.
“Then one night after that girl and I had called it quits, I was at a dinner with my father, one of those business banquets. Here I was at five p.m., surrounded by middle-aged men downing shots of ridiculously expensive rice wine. By six, everyone was hammered, and my father stood up to make a toast. There had been a dozen or more toasts before this, but this time he toasted to me, to his son, following in his footsteps, becoming a rich, successful man in his own right. I cheered and guzzled my liquid fire alongside everyone else, but there was something about this statement that undid me on the inside, underscored all the progress I’d made. I looked around the table of red-faced men, overgrown lobsters, shrieking and pinching at all the things they could acquire in this world, and I felt gutted. You might just say, oh, it was the alcohol, but there was something so overwhelmingly depressing about this predictable future that was mine for the having.
“I really wish I could say that I stood up and made some profound speech at that dinner. That I walked out and emptied my wallet into some beggar’s bowl. That I founded a charity, started eating organic food, whatever. But I was hardly that brave, and it was another year of bad acting and cheesy modeling and bouncing around thumping clubs, searching for something I couldn’t identify and would therefore never find, before I truly found my way out.
“Some time after this dinner, I started reading up on spirituality and slowly began identifying as a Buddhist. Coincidentally, a friend of my mother’s had recently gone on a photography expedition to Lhasa. She showed me beautiful pictures and told me a heartbreaking story she’d heard there, about an old Tibetan granny who had prostrated her way to a temple in Qinghai from a tiny village. Her bones were brittle and her knees ached, but this pilgrimage, this thank-you to the gods, was essential so that she could get to the temple and make a final wish.
“When after two weeks of hard travel she reached the temple, the Chinese guard barked, ‘Granny, where is your registration permit?’
“The granny held up her shriveled hands. ‘I’ve got no permit to travel. But I am an old woman and I want to make a wish.’
“No matter how hard she begged and cried, the guard wouldn’t let her in.
“At the end of this story, my mom’s friend shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know. I’m sure the guard just thought he was doing his job.’
“I was disturbed by this story, disgusted by this guard, disgraced by this friend’s reaction. Aren’t we all the same? Who gives any one person the right to stop another person from making a wish
? What gives anyone else the right to comment upon these atrocities, to justify them, to normalize them? Tibet plagued my thoughts, my dreams. I knew I needed to go, that my life was pushing me in that direction, and as it so happened, this friend of my mother’s knew a few Chinese businessmen in Tibet who were doing well for themselves and put me in touch. It was one of those guys who sold me this bar…”
“Wow,” said Zhang Li. “An actor. I wonder if we’d recognize him. Do you remember his real name?”
“No,” the turtle said. “He was known to me only as Boss.”
Lulu stared out the window. “But what about that band you went to see? Were they good?”
“Yes,” said the turtle. “Boss was pretty happy with them. He hired them for the opening night and told them that if it went well they could come back and play regularly.”
Zhang Li pantomimed playing guitar. She stuck out her tongue. “I wish I could take guitar lessons. Or drums. I’d love to be a rocker. But no, I must play piano.” She spoke in a mock parent voice, straightened her spine, pantomimed playing piano, a dour expression on her face.
Lulu laughed. “Hey there,” she said. “Cheer up, maybe you can take guitar lessons in America.”
Zhang Li glared back at her. A spell had been broken. “I’m not going to America.” She looked down at the turtle, who was looking up at her. Then, with tears welling up in her eyes, she too began to laugh, falling back into the absurdity of it all.
That evening, after some hard work and shared drinks, I excused myself upstairs. I felt very tired from this, my first day of total freedom. I thought about how I needed to e-mail one of the twins to stop by, wondering if they were wondering about me. I wore street clothes now, clothes that Boss had given me. I’d caught sight of myself in a mirror earlier that day, in more than one mirror, and I felt simultaneously compelled each time to both gape at this strange, unremarkable man-child and to turn away. I sat on the bed now and picked up my folded robes, held them in my lap, and brushed them, dusting them, chanting the heart sutra. Old habits, you know. I didn’t see Boss come in, but he sat beside me. The mattress sank under his weight. I fell silent, self-conscious. He said, “No, please continue.” Shyly, I did. I watched him from the corner of my eye as I chanted. He shut his eyes and rocked ever so slightly along.
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