She walks past me to the kitchen. Takes out a frying pan. Cracks open the egg. It has a light red yolk, and she warms it up. Two minutes later, she sits down at the table. “Have some.”
“Umm…”
She gives me a fork. “EAT!” she commands.
I take a bite, am stunned. She asks if I need salt or Tabasco. I shake my head.
“This is the best egg I’ve ever had.”
4:19AM: Once we finish, she says, “If you’re not here in the morning, I understand.”
“Is it every time?”
She nods. “One of my ancestors burned down five henhouses and killed over twenty thousand chickens during the Opium Wars. The farmer who owned the land cursed him, and all the women in our family have laid eggs since.”
“Is that a true story?”
“Not sure,” she replies, walks to her bed and passes out.
I go to the kitchen and clean up, throw away the egg shells. Look through the hundreds of books she has on foreign languages.
9:22AM: Next morning, she wakes up.
“You’re still here,” she says, surprised.
I hand her the marker she used for tagging. Put out my palm.
“Mark it,” I say.
Forbidden City Hoops
We went out at daybreak, as soon as we could see. We hustled through the shopping menagerie of Wangfujing, through the barren plains of Tiananmen, into the crimson maze of the Forbidden City, to a hidden corner where the guards had set up a basketball hoop to shoot a few during their breaks.
I was afraid of getting caught but Alice, my girlfriend, assured me that no soldiers came out this early—too afraid of the phantoms and spirits of ancient court officials.
Chinese with dark hazel eyes, she was the stubborn dilettante who enjoyed the chaotic stringency of Beijing, looting its bazaar of experiences and bartering with street merchants for old teeth and dragon horns. She was like a defiant Chinese hornpipe, her melodies clashing with the pipes next to her, the sound changing timbres faster than a tuk-tuk racing down the streets of Chang’An. There was nothing she liked better than her own private basketball court. With her own private rules.
“These rules are stupid,” she’d complained when I began to teach her the refinements.
“Rules are rules.”
“Why can’t we change them?”
“Because that’s the way they are.”
“Emperors and empresses could change the rules anytime they wanted.”
“You want to be the new empress of basketball, be my guest,” I said.
“Okay, how about we play with the rule, you can’t get within a foot of me, and anytime you do, I automatically get an extra point.”
“What kind of rule is that?”
“A good one.”
The next day, the rule was, “If you hit the rim, it counts as a point.”Then there was the day she permitted wrestling, so whenever I went for a shot, she’d tackle me, grab the ball, and put it in for a layup. Last week, she declared, “It’s opposite-point day.” Whenever I scored, she’d get the point. Whenever she scored, she tallied it for herself.
“Is that fair?” I asked.
“Who said anything about fair? You forget where we are?”
Never. The palace of the Ming and Qing emperors towered majestically; the symmetry and planning, coordinated to a brick. Grandeur was the theme and bright red, its coat of armor. The site was so massive, it was a marathon just to find the bathroom, marching past the serpentine cypress trees and the statues of turtle gods.
I marveled at the idea that once long ago, I wouldn’t have been allowed to enter. Now, tourists swarmed the palace, snapping photos. The original name was Ziji Cheng, or Purple Forbidden City, the purple referring to the north star, which was the heavenly abode for the Celestial Emperor. Even though he was considered the most powerful of the gods, he wasn’t responsible for the creation of the world. In fact, the Chinese are the only major civilization without a creation myth. It was as though they’ve always been in existence.
Much like Alice. I couldn’t imagine my life before her.
A production assistant from Shanghai, she had quirky eyes that seemed incapable of stillness. I was a photographer from the States, discontent with the brittle tapestry of loneliness and its withering ramifications. Forced beauty had been my addiction, evaporating when I realized I wanted something more than the veneer and sham of digitized desire. It was fleeing a shoot for Calvin Klein one afternoon that I had discovered our basketball court.
I fell in love with Beijing’s eccentricities the moment I landed, the lavish landscape of skyscrapers intermingling casually with the ancient hutongs and decrepit apartments. It all seemed like part of the canvas of a brilliant beatnik engineer suffering delusions of petulance, never satisfied, always proud. Flaws weren’t pariah here; foibles were badges of character, not something to be brushed away in Photoshop.
I started dating Alice when I asked a group of models during a shoot for good food recommendations. No one answered except for the lone production assistant carrying coffee for the talent.
“Beijing has the best food in the world,” she declared.
Then she went out of her way to prove it, bombarding me with dishes like braised beef and rabbit tail grilled to impeccability. There were feasts of frog cheeks and deer brain served with the famous kaoya, Peking Duck, wrapped in duck sauce and cucumbers, simmering yellow wine to accompany the mung bean soup and the curry salted crab. I ate whatever she threw at me and she appreciated my boldness by accepting every date I asked her for.
After our eighth date, I asked if I could come by her place.
“Sorry, can’t do that,” she replied.
“Why not?”
“I have twelve cats and they get really jealous.”
“I can handle jealousy.”
“Not when they’re scratching your face and peeing all over your clothes. How about we go over to your place instead?”
I laughed, wondering how serious she was. “Sure.”
My living room is generously proportioned, but television sets occupy every square inch: huge dreadnaughts, small kitchen units, old antiquated relics, brand-new flat screens.
“I’ve never seen so many TVs in a room,” she said.
“I collect them from the dump, and I make sure every screen plays a different channel.”
“Why?”
“I love the music of discordance,” I answered, then flipped on all the TVs with the master control.
“Wow,” she said. “It’s kind of romantic in a weird way.”
I kissed her. She twitched, but kissed me back. We stood in each other’s arms, basking in the histrionic rays of television tubes that synchronized to the blend of comedy, drama, and infomercials.
We made love in a haphazard dance to the drone of a thousand channels, and, when we finished, she whispered to me about her childhood. “My mom used to own a clothing store in Hebei and that meant I got to try new dresses every week. I sooo enjoyed dressing people up, and my best friend was a mannequin,” she said. “Is that strange?”
I grinned, running my fingers along her hair.
“One of my favorite feelings in the world is to make someone feel beautiful,” she said.
“Is that why you got into the fashion industry?”
“Either that or get an office job… and I’m allergic to offices.”
Whenever I saw her, she was wearing a different hat: a pink beret one day, an azure cap the next. She wore beanies when we played hoops, and her general zeal for winning expressed itself boldly in the lucid hues of her hats. Mahjong, jiangqi, our basketball games—didn’t matter—she hated defeat and reveled in victory. After winning each morning series, she sauntered through the subways, singing songs that had never been sung, brushing confidently past the buffet of pedestrians obsessed with their daily compulsions.
“You know what I think I deserve for how badly I beat you?” she asked.
“What?”
“Honey sprinkled on top of a garlic sweet potato filled with custard from inside, and a brownie on the side with caramel poured all over it.”
“That sounds like a recipe for a heart attack.”
“Yummy,” she answered with a mischievous grin.
She had a fierce exterior, and it was hard to imagine the night debilitating her will. But she suffered continual nightmares; she dreamed about the end of the world in a submersion of candy wrappers, and soda cans that devoured the ocean.
As soon as she nodded off, she’d grind her teeth in a quick series of stutters, little tics of motion pulsating from finger to calf. I’d hold her in my arms, thinking about what happened after we’d been dating five months.
We were meeting to watch a Chinese opera. I rushed to our rendezvous point, saw her on the other side of the street. She waved, took a step forward. At that moment, a taxi swerved to avoid a woman lugging her baby in a quick dash. And hit a motorcycle that lost control and smashed into the trashcan next to Alice.
I was unsure of what to do. She had jumped out of the way, but had tripped over the sidewalk. I rushed over, saw that she was okay, and went to the motorcyclist. There was blood all over him, but he was conscious. I dialed for emergency help.
The medics rushed everyone to the hospital. To my surprise, Alice had broken her ankle and shattered part of her knee. As she was about to go into surgery, she looked at me and asked, “How come you didn’t take care of me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You just watched when the accident happened and then you went to the motorcyclist first.”
“I saw that you were okay.”
“But you didn’t even ask me how I was.”
Before I could respond, she closed her eyes and went in for her operation. Why hadn’t I rushed to her side?
She was confined to a wheelchair for three months. When she was finally able to walk, she did so with a bad limp. If she was disappointed, she did her best to hide it. “I’m alive and my stomach is intact,” she said. “And I can still walk.” But I noticed cruel glances from people passing by, and so did she.
I tried to cheer her up by renewing our culinary excursions. At first, we faced difficulties just finding places with wheelchair access. But even after she could walk again, she seemed reluctant to go out. “I found a great Shandong restaurant, wanna go?”
“Not really. I’m pretty tired,” she answered.
“But they have your favorite kidney coriander dish and it’s supposed to be awesome.”
“I don’t wanna go in a taxi right now. It’s too far.”
Not only had her enthusiasm for food dwindled, but an undercurrent of melancholy sieved through her like sticky porridge.
She spent months in rehab. While dozing off in the hospital lobbies, she lectured me about one of her hidden passions—finance. About variable interest rates, derivatives, Bernanke’s warnings, why Warren Buffett was against portfolio diversification, and the housing crisis in America, topics I was aware of only as catch-phrases from TV. I enjoyed the lessons and she did too as it gave her an opportunity to forget about her own situation.
“You need to save, to have at least six months backed up,” she admonished me.
“Yes boss,” I answered.
After her treatments ended, we both hoped she’d make a full recovery. But her step continued to waver.
“Will I be ever able to walk again without pain?” she asked the doctors.
They weren’t sure because of further complications in her torn muscles. “You need to be active about trying to heal it.”
We did bike rides through the city to strengthen her knee, weaving into a fleet of bicycles, playing Entourage through the winding tapestry of the labyrinthine roads. Cars honked impatiently as they waded through the haphazard morass of traffic, and we imbibed the scents of burning ginseng and pork wontons from the street vendors. In the evenings, we’d hit the local gym and swim like trout, sucking up hot ramen afterwards.
“I hate noodles,” she complained.
“Then how come you always eat them?” I asked.
“I always find myself drawn to things I hate. Don’t you ever do that?”
The truth was, with every taxi ride through the city, I prayed for another accident. Not so that either of us would get hurt, but because I wanted to find some way to make up for my previous lapse.
One day, we were watching her favorite TV show, a comedy/celebrity interview/star search bonanza that usually left me cringing. An NBA player I wasn’t familiar with happened to be a guest. He did some tricks with his basketball, taking part in a dribbling competition with two teens that were China’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters.
“We should play again,” she told me.
“When do you want to start?”
“Tomorrow.”
There was drifting snow on our court the next morning, and our breath steamed out of us. We were nervous about getting caught, we argued more about the rules, and our hands froze.
Our ritual continued four times a week. Even if she wobbled as she dribbled, she was getting better, learning to adjust for the weakness in her knee, insisting on practicing at least 500 free throws a day. She fell a lot, but when she did, she’d hop right back up.
A month in, she took a particularly bad fall. I rushed to assist her in getting up. But I couldn’t help being frustrated with myself as I saw her wince in pain.
“What’s wrong?” she asked when she got back on her feet.
I turned away.
“What’s wrong?” she asked again.
“You think there’s something I could have done to avoid this?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean during the accident…” And even though there were a million apologies I wanted to make, my well of words dried up.
She shrugged. “If you feel bad, you can buy me dinner for the rest of my life.”
“I’m being serious.”
“Cheer up,” she said. “Remember, we don’t know what this life really is. Don’t worry about it.”
“But if I had done something…”
“Like what?”
I didn’t have an answer.
She shook her head. “Did I ever tell you the story about Gumang?”
“No.”
“It’s a province where the sun never rises and the moon never sets. People there used to spend more than two-thirds of their life sleeping and dreaming. They believed the waking life was illusion and the dreams, reality. When I look in the mirror and see myself, I can’t believe this is real. But I’m alive, my leg feels a lot better, and the other night, I had a dream I became an NBA star better than Kobe, super-rich too.”
“You think that’s the reality?”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “I hope so… What about you? What’s your dream?”
“Mine?” I thought about it. “My life here in China, being with you—it all feels like a dream. I don’t want it to ever end.”
“Then don’t wake up,” she said.
The workout gave her an appetite, and she devoured our dinner.
The next day, she had a new rule. “You have to sit while you play.”
I sat down. “What about you?”
“Of course I get to stand,” she said.
She gave me a good beating as usual.
Afterwards, I told her, “Congratulations.”
“You’re too easy. I think I need to find better competition.”
“Are you talking trash to me?” I asked, laughing.
She looked over at me, a worried glint crossing her eyes. “Okay, rematch.”
“What’s the rule this time?” I asked.
“Whoever makes a basket, we both get a point.”
“But then no one wins.”
“Actually, it means we both win,” she said. “Now c’mon, I’ll let you take out.”
The Wolf’s Choice
I.
v=Hd was the equation for the rat
e at which galaxies sped away from one another, the H standing for Hubble’s Constant, the v, for the vapid volume of velocity. The third variable was d, representing distance, the diametrical disposition of difference. And somehow, these three digits summarized the universe into a trinity of letters, simplicity exemplified. It struck me, when I first learned the variables, how it would have taken a thousand times more energy to resist change than to accept it.
I’d spent eight months wandering through the honeycomb of Asia, shifty Bangkok, grand Beijing, contemporary Shanghai, futuristic Tokyo, all convicted in the nexus of modernization and unshackled faith. I was adrift, tugged and pulled by the gravity of solitude, a festering hunger driving me like a relentless martinet.
“When did you get so afraid of loneliness?” May, my ex, had asked a month before I left. “You used to love being by yourself.”
She always talked about the beginning of time, the constant motion of the universe.
“Everything in life is us trying to reproduce that first moment,” she said. “That frenzy of unsustainable energy exploding into a billion directions.”
Was she trying to reproduce that moment when she poured Drano into her coffee? She melted her esophagus and stomach, bombarded her entrails with acid and left as the shell of a dead star. I became an imago mired in puberty, a roach who woke up one morning and found he’d metamorphosed into a human.
When I returned to my workplace in the States, I’d overcome the manifestation of my inner turbulence. In the hospitals of Seoul, I’d cut my cheeks, reshaped my nose, incinerated my brows, elevated my chin. When I first took off the bandages, I thought the doctors had pulled a joke on me: I couldn’t see any difference. Only after I compared my mirrored image with old photos from two months before my convalescence could I see how much I’d actually changed.
My first day back, several colleagues entered my cubicle, about to welcome me when they stopped, confused by my appearance. “Did Keith move seats?”
“It’s me,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s me, Keith.”
There was a momentary pause followed by uncomfortable glances.
“How come you look completely different?”
Watering Heaven Page 2