“You can’t be serious.”
“If enough people had the guts to stand up to tyrants, the world would be pretty different.”
“Doug is no tyrant. He just wants power and fame.”
“That’s all tyrants… You want to hear something sad?”
“I think I’m watching it.”
Larry sat down. Put his hand into the pellets. Kathy rushed towards him and tried to stop him. But he threw a handful into his mouth before she could prevent him.
“We have to get to the hospital!”
Larry laughed. “I’m doing this willingly.”
“For rats?”
He shook his head. “Because I believe it’s right…”
She turned away, incredulous. She bit her lip till it bled so she wouldn’t betray herself with a tear. “You’re an idiot, Larry. This won’t do anything.”
“You’re probably right. Born a failure, lived a failure, die a failure.”
She called 911. “Stay up, I’m not gonna let you die.”
But he was already coughing up blood and his face was wan.
“You idiot.”
“Thanks.”
Kathy blinked rapidly, her face weakening. She moved her lips close to his, about to kiss. He stopped her. “M-my lips… poison…” He started convulsing.
The ambulance arrived five minutes after he had passed away.
*
Hours later, Kathy was back in her room alone. There were thirteen missed calls from Doug. She shut off her phone. Noticed an army of rats running along the walls. She grabbed leftovers from her fridge, took off her wig, rubbed her scalp. Spotted a web camera she’d used for chatting, turned it on. Pointed it at her bed and stripped until she was naked. Her body had no hair. She lay down, covered herself with food. Within thirty minutes, she was swimming in a sea of rats.
Staccato
Six weeks of every year, I take a trip to Beijing and invent a new ‘me.’ I usually pick international hotels because everyone there wears a costume too. Mine is ‘Eric Jia’ and I sell vitamins to cows.
The hotel is in the Wudaokou area near one of the main universities, Tsinghua. There’s lots of exchange students here, a thriving cultural mishmash in Beijing.
Partly drugged by jet lag and nocturnal remissions, I chat with Violet, a Korean art student who paints noses over fingers as a motif on misguided sense. Abraham, a disillusioned meteorologist, likes to ask, “If rain were as heavy as bullets, would people have found a way to change weather, or would they have invented bullet-proof umbrellas?” The German brunette across from me refuses to give her name, only dates rich Chinese guys, and has a row with them every night before loud, raucous sex.
I talk about vitamins with the other guests. Cells normally subdivide until they die, I explain, a vestige of reincarnation sucking away at the original. A healthy dose of vitamin E can prolong age and life by increasing the durability of cell regeneration after mitosis.
The first time I see Jean Hua, she’s holding a violin with broken strings, sipping on a cocktail in the lobby. She’s Chinese but has placid blue eyes that appear to drift. Riveting is a word I shouldn’t use carelessly, as I’ve had a bad experience with rivets. But her eyes are riveting.
I introduce myself, tell her why I’m here.
She stares skeptically. “What do you really do?”
“I sell vitamins to help lengthen the lives of cows.”
She finishes her drink, puts it down.
“What about you?” I ask.
“I sell dead moths and play music on broken instruments.” She plucks a string on the violin. It sounds like a screech. She says, “Zaijian” (or “good-bye”) in Mandarin before leaving abruptly.
The next couple of nights, I linger around the lobby, hoping to bump into her again. Instead, I get stuck with Adam. Adam’s spent five of the past eight years in an American prison for kidnapping neighborhood pugs. Used to be religious but couldn’t understand how any superior being could create an animal so ugly. “I wish I could eradicate them,” he declares, shaking with rage. “How can people treat these dogs better than human beings?”
He burps loudly, rants about the evils of signal lights, and scares away women by showing scars on his ass. I wish he’d go away, but he doesn’t and shares his cheap Chinese alcohol that’s 60 proof. “The Chinese bred pugs because they thought the wrinkles in the face made them look like dragons,” I tell Adam, but he’s passed out, and I don’t think he wants to hear about the congruence of ugliness. I stumble to my room and black out.
“A girl committed suicide in your room,” is the first thing I hear when I open my eyes.
Across from my bed is the violin player, Jean. She’s holding my wallet. “Your real name is Emma Jia?”
I try to snatch my wallet away but she dodges my hand.
“You wanna explain?” she asks.
“Can I have my wallet back?”
She shakes her head.
“How did you get in here?” I demand.
“You collapsed halfway through your door. Explain Emma to me,” she repeats.
I hesitate, see the resoluteness in her eyes. “My, uh… My mom had two miscarriages before I was born. So when she saw I was a boy, she named me after a girl because she thought the evil spirits would ignore me that way… Why were you going through my stuff?” I snap, more embarrassed than angry.
Moments of humiliation in my youth flit across my memory. “Emma Jia!” the teachers would call. To which I’d reluctantly reply, “Here.” Always the disbelief followed by giggles and the disdain of boys who’d bully me with fists and cruel chants.
She smiles, amused. “You wanna go to the Great Wall?”
“When?”
“Right now. A bunch of us are going to party.”
“But it’s…” And I check the time. “2 a.m.”
“The night’s just begun. Get changed.”
There’s a group of about fifteen from the hotel. Lily and Rick join our taxi. Lily used to be a phone sex operator in the States until her job got outsourced to Thailand. Now she’s an animal activist whose favorite book is Animal Farm. “It’s such a moving portrayal of how cruel humans are to animals and how they can stand up for their rights,” she says.
“I think the book was actually abou–”
“I know, everyone’s already told me it’s really only about the mistreatment of farm animals. But I think it extends to all nature. You like it, right?”
Rick’s a French hippie posing as a Brazilian food critic who can’t stop hiccupping because he drinks wine and chews gum at the same time.
Outside our cab, there’s convoys of trucks from Inner Mongolia and Hebei floating between cities like dead whales carried by convex currents.
Jean says she grew up raising lizards in Texas, her dad a taxidermist who loved his job too much. She studied biology in college, took part in an exchange program helping impoverished farmers in rural China. She’s been traveling all over Asia since.
We arrive at the Great Wall (Changcheng), an interminable road that’s barely visible in the dark. Alien trees abound. I hear loud rave music. There’s a massive tent sprawling over parts of the wall. It’s a nightclub and there are thousands of people inside.
The club incorporates the Wall so that the primary dance floor is on top of it. A girl at the front door throws up in her Gucci bag; guys wear sunglasses in the night; waitresses dress in skimpy lingerie and fake armor. We climb up a watchtower, buy Maotais. The bricks are covered with graffiti and silhouettes of dancing couples.
It’s muggy and hot out, but Jean’s wearing long sleeves and a blue dress. I’m in jeans, a black silk shirt, a fake Rolex I bought at Hongqiao for two bucks.
“Did a girl really commit suicide in my room?”
She nods.
“Why?” I ask. But as I do, a moth the size of my palm lands on my shoulder. It’s iridescent, a swirl of beige and vermilion. I flinch.
“You scared?”
&nbs
p; “It’s huge.”
She laughs, takes it from me. “When moths burn themselves in candles and bulbs, it’s because they mix it up with the light from the moon.”
“Why would they need light from the moon?”
“They use it to navigate. But most never reach their destination.”
“Why’s that?”
“They burn to death in distractions.”
“You really sell dead moths?” I ask.
“You really sell vitamins?”
The Maotais are strong. “I’m an accountant.”
“And I’m a failed violinist,” she replies. “You enjoy your work?”
“I love numbers, especially imaginary ones,” I say. “You realize the fall of society began with the concept of irrational numbers?”
“How so?”
“It quantified madness.”
(Should I have said legitimized?)
“What are you thinking about?” she asks.
“Do blind people have porn?”
“What?”
I explain how that question compelled my cousin, Amanda, into a ridiculous pyramid scheme involving ‘malleable silicones.’ She ended up melting into excess blubber as she became the prisoner of her own volition, living in the prison cell of an unpayable mortgage and a moral repugnance designed to earn brownie points in heaven.
All possible by tricky accounting legerdemains, perpetrated by none other than… her best friend: me. We partied across Europe, backpacked through Mongolia, cruised down the Amazon. We got a gig in Hong Kong as ‘tofu mascots,’ sold makeup for pennies in Mexico, and vowed to eat a hamburger in every city in the world.
After her financial collapse, she punished herself through food, created a penitentiary of fat as a moat around her life. Last time I saw her, she’d ballooned to four hundred pounds, barely able to move.
“What about your music?” I ask Jean.
“A true musician doesn’t use passion. She transcends it.”
“You did that?”
“I got mired in the staccatos.”
I’ve always had a hard time with accents, and my Mandarin is horrible. But more and more Chinese talk to me in Mandarin and I don’t know what they’re saying. Dance areas are separated by different styles, a tango section to the west, a salsa mix in the north. I show Jean some moves and she spins around me like a mispivoted merry-go-round, orbital, then rectangular.
“What were some of your staccatos?” I ask.
“Misplaced desire,” she replies, “and frail fingertips.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s this story,” she starts, stumbles from drink. “A heavenly moth fell in love with the sun. Half of every day, they’d lie together, and her wings would cover the sun so it’d turn into night. A couple thousand years passed, and the sun fell in love with another moth. The first moth was cast out. But she still loved him and orbited the Earth, content reflecting the sun’s light to the rest of the world.”
Some of the tango dances have us leaning into one another, and she warns me, “I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”
“What are you looking for?”
She smiles. “A pet.” She bites my shoulder, a painful stab that makes me jump back, her teeth clenched.
“That hurts,” I groan.
She lets go.
“You have a favorite type of pet?” I ask.
“Pugs,” she replies. “I adore them.”
Around 4:32 a.m., Lily tells us we’re moving to our next stop, an outdoor concert for a Thai band that’s inside one of the old guard towers. All their songs are about local crimes: a man who blew up public toilets, a girl who replaced shampoo in hair salons with bleach.
One of Jean’s friends, Zheng Lei, has bought her flowers, asking nervously how she’s doing. He’s wearing an expensive suit, thick glasses. They prattle a few minutes before she excuses herself, wanting to go rollerblading. Outside, there’s the echo of drums and electric guitars blending with a choir of crickets.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she says. “Lei would be following me the whole night if you weren’t.”
“He likes you?”
“He asked me to marry him on our first date.”
“What’d you say?”
She gives me a dubious look and says, “A couple days before we were supposed to meet up for the first time, it started snowing like crazy. He gave me a call, told me he’d take me to work. I told him, it’s all right, I don’t wanna burden you, but he said he was already waiting downstairs. He brought up breakfast and that was our first date.”
“He’s devoted.”
“Is that the most important trait in a lover?”
“What do you think?”
“Lei owns a bank, is a multimillionaire, and is good-looking. But he’s soooo boring. All he ever talks about is money.”
“Being interesting is the key?”
She shakes her head. “Voluntary blindness.”
We rent rollerblades and even though the Wall is steep, with high slopes and sudden drops, we ride across as fast as we can. I stumble after a few meters, alcohol making my balancing act tenuous. She laughs at me and swirls around, making bold brushstrokes with her legs. I jump up, fall again, get up, race after her, lose control, drop too quickly, and crash into the side of the wall.
“Oww…”
She laughs again. “You have really short legs.”
I give chase across the Great Wall but it’s hopeless. She rides through like an electrical impulse on axons and dendrites.
“My daddy used to go rollerblading with me when I was a kid,” she says. “Hey! Mr. Short Legs. Are you listening to me?”
“Did you just call me…”
She smiles. “I heard you can’t really see Changcheng from space.”
“It’s supposed to be like looking at dental floss from two miles away.”
“You use dental floss?”
“Sometimes. You?” I ask.
“I think it should be a law. Floss before sleep every night.”
“What would that achieve?”
She giggles and pecks me on the lip. “You know how many times that’s ended in disaster because of bad breath?”
Zheng Lei rents a limousine for the others, but Jean insists we sneak away in our own cab. “Something I wanna show you.”
About fifteen minutes from the Wall, there’s a decrepit cave lit by torches. There are scrolls lying on the ground, some ancient columns with chipped red paint. Inside is an old man covered with gray hair, humming to himself.
“He’s an old Taoist monk who’s been meditating here for thirty years,” Jean explains. “He hasn’t eaten a drop of food the whole time.”
“Sounds miserable.”
“Moths don’t eat, you know that? They’re born, they transform, they fuck, then they die.”
“I admire their purity.”
When we arrive back at our hotel, it’s morning. We stumble up to her room. I kiss her, she kisses me back. “Sorry, I gotta use the restroom real quick,” I say. I use it, return. She’s passed out on her bed. I lie next to her and fall asleep.
My eyes open around 3 p.m. She’s still asleep. I notice her arm sleeves are rolled up. There are scars underneath, her flesh dark and twisted. Beauty, burned to cinders—it’s hard to look at.
Her eyes open and she sees where I’m staring. “It was a cooking accident because I burned my fingertips. I got out of the house but my arms were burnt. The whole house went down. My daddy went back in to try to save my violin and burned to death.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You can leave now,” she says.
“But…”
“Just go.”
I wait for her at night. The next two days. Finally, I see a maid enter her room.
“The girl here checked out yesterday,” she tells me.
I’m disappointed. But I understand. We all have our costumes. None of us likes to be found out.
Gradients
> Sharon Wang, historian or poet depending on her mood, hires me to photograph a Chinese man who claims he can fly. “8,726 needles in him,” she says, “and Mr. Li Tong starts floating.”
She doesn’t pay me much, but I have a secret crush on her, and Li Tong lives in an abandoned amusement park about two hours from LA—meaning we’ll get to spend some ‘quality’ time together.
“You think the world would look very different if your eyes were shaped square?” she asks.
The digital frame on my camera is a perfectly symmetrical square. “It’d be a lot more angular,” I reply.
I became a photographer because of my best friend from college. Tom went to the Iraq War as a photojournalist, died his third week there: explosives in the toilets that went off with a flush. He left me all his camera gear in his will scrawled out in chicken hand for his mom.
Is it strange to say my destiny was determined by guilt?
“I’ve spent half my life looking for a pair of missing shoes,” Sharon tells me as we drive.
“Kind of like Cinderella?”
“I mean like boots covered in shit—my daddy’s shoes.”
Shi Chang Wang catalogued shit for a living. Literally. Waded through tons of it to measure chemical composition. He was a researcher in the concentration camps the Vietnamese set up for the Chinese during the little-known Third Vietnamese War.
Little known compared to the second Vietnamese War against the Americans and the first versus the French. The Chinese came, saw, conquered, then left as soon as they could.
From the content of the shit, he could determine how well-fed or malnourished prisoners were. He’d find remnants of human bones and animals that should never have been eaten, distinguish coloration as melena or giardiasis. Cruelty and kindness left traces in the feces, and he exposed the conquering armies by recording concentrations of E. coli, bacteroides, and blood.
Spent thirty years on his seminal work, Dialogue with Feces: A Serious Analysis of the Consequences of War From the Perspective of Twenty-Two Camp Latrines.
She tells me we don’t have to pick up Rob and Suzy for our trip. Rob’s her producer. He quit his former job because he hated being the guy whose job was attending meetings. Suzy is assistant to Sharon, resident blogger who declared war on spam mailers.
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