I’m not disappointed since it will just be the two of us until Sharon reminds me of our goal: capture proof of a guy who can fly and make it a story no one else has the guts to report.
The Amusement Park creeps up on us. The first thing we see is a dilapidated Ferris wheel with colors that have dissipated into rust and muted hues. There’s a roller coaster shaped like a starfish, an assortment of tents that resemble an abandoned bivouac, broken rides jutting like unwanted pimples and canker sores.
The stench is unbearable. Vomit mixed with excrement and decaying flesh. Its source is a river running through the park that’s become a dumping ground, thirty meters wide, algae and garbage sheath. Dumping ground for the hundred or so homeless who’ve made a home of the park.
There’s families, children with sooty faces. A line of women wear thick coats. Two twins chase each other with ancient toy swords. There’s a guy who has hair down to his feet and all we see is his Abraham Lincoln nose.
“The new American dream founded on the nightmare of achieving it,” Sharon says.
Li Tong’s partner meets us. She’s an obese Chinese woman with no brows and shriveled yellow teeth. Every response is a gruff grunt.
“Is Li Tong ready?” Grunt. “Where is he?” Grunt. “What is this place? Who are these people?” Grunt. Grunt.
I lug two lights, my equipment bag. We’re led through the park and there’s many more impoverished than we’d initially seen. They watch us like zoo animals. I look like a zebra with my black-white striped shirt, part Asian, part American, neither really, just an epilepsy-inducing potpourri that looks like a coolie with my oily hair and wiry body.
“Walt, c’mon!” Sharon calls me.
The guide drops us off at an emporium of cheap goods and signals us to wait. Sharon is excited at the exotic merchandise. A woman with a wispy beard greets us and says, “We haven’t had many new customers since the great balloon collapse.”
“What balloon collapse?”
“Captain Jake Descartes flew his hot air balloon into the ground and killed himself after his wife left him for a monkey.” She stares wistfully at a poster of an old balloon. “Fortunately, business has been picking up because so many people have been coming to live here after they’ve lost their jobs.”
Sharon’s hypnotized by a gigantic insect encased in honey. “That’s a rare species of moth found only in Peru,” the merchant says. “It latches onto your face and sucks the saliva from your tongue.”
“You mean it’s making out with you?” Sharon wonders.
I’d love to be a moth like that for a day. Lunge in on her face and blame my moth nature.
There’s daguerreotypes on sale from long ago, haunting faces that resemble wax models. “Most of these people are dead,” Sharon says. “These twenty-five cent cards are the only proof they were ever alive.”
“Do you need proof you were alive?”
“You don’t care if people remember you after you’re dead?”
I shrug. “My grandpa used to say, ‘If you live for the future, you’re a corpse to the present.’”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you mention anyone from your family,” she says.
I lift up one of the images. “This guy looks exactly like him.”
My grandpa peddled quaint stories about humans the size of ticks and empires crushed by legions of angry fish. He was an asshole to his kids, treated his workers like slaves. He passed away alone in some alley in Chinatown. His favorite story was about a king who died and reincarnated as a pigeon. The king had been cruel, imposing heavy taxes and starving his people so he could fund three private palaces. He was found by a ravenous hunter, boiled and eaten for dinner.
The closest I ever got to Sharon was on a drunken night about five months ago when I took her home and she talked about photons from the sun obliterating electricity.
“My mom left my daddy when I was eleven, took me with her,” she said. “When I was older, I asked her why she left.”
“And?” I asked.
“She couldn’t stand the fact that he always smelled like shit.”
The guide finally takes us to see Li Tong. He’s in a dark auditorium lit by a thousand candles. He looks like a human porcupine with thousands of needles lodged inside him.
I snap a couple quick shots. Li Tong chants in a language I don’t recognize. His body begins to levitate. A few inches, slowly ascending. I check the ceiling for strings. Don’t see any.
“He spent twenty-seven years meditating before he floated an inch,” the guide suddenly says in perfect English. “And now, behold!”
Li Tong flies up in a twirl. Swoops past us, more agile than a dove. Air is his swimming pool and he dances like a ballerina.
Sharon grips my wrist. “Are you getting this?”
“Yeah.”
A miracle squared.
“How is this possible?” Sharon whispers to me.
“Three years,” Li Tong speaks, “I didn’t think of right or wrong, benefit and harm. I cleared polarities from my head. Five years, I focused on good and evil, advantage versus disadvantage. Eight years later, my action had transcended consequence, and by my twenty-seventh year, my thoughts melded with nature and all my flesh and bones had evaporated.”
His expression is carefree. Even when he’s doing difficult aerial moves, his face is neutral.
The interview lasts about an hour. He describes his life like torn pages in a library, masquerading as a hunger artist, philandering with women of ill repute, gambling with psychics and losing to them at mahjong. “Walking on water is easy if you know where to step,” he says.
His wife was an Indian snake charmer and they loved each other dearly. “But we were like those two ill-fated lover gods who shouted at each other until they became so cold and obdurate, they turned into mountains.”
His epiphany was a hummingbird and a bat to his head (his wife was sent to prison for battery). He lost all sense of 3-D perception and the world became a flat plane.
“Everything had gradients. Everything was linear from the right angle.”
Sharon is giddy, more excited than I’ve ever seen her. As our session ends, she asks if we can have one last demonstration.
“Give me a short respite,” Li Tong asks.
Li Tong and the guide scuffle vociferously. I’m not sure what it’s about but it’s intense. The guide storms off.
We review the video and it’s hard to believe. It’s like cheap computer graphics. But there’s nothing artificial about it.
“This is going to change our lives,” she says.
I nod. “It’s pretty incredible.”
“This whole place,” she says, sweeping her hand. “It’s like a subculture frozen in the Arctic. There’ll be a thousand stories here. If the world hears about it…”
If they hear about it, they’ll marvel at it for a second and forget it the next. But I don’t want to dash her hopes, just agreeing with everything she says.
Li Tong prepares for another flight. The guide is nowhere in sight. Several of the inhabitants of the park are watching. He starts slowly, ascending in nodules. Blasts off, screeching through the air. He’s like a zygote or an imago streaming through a placenta. Sharon unconsciously grips my hand, her chest crunched up in expectation. Her eyes follow every motion, and the only thing keeping me from watching him is her.
“Why aren’t you recording?” she demands.
I get out my camera, zoom in. Li Tong’s face is taut and there’s sweat covering his face. He looks exhausted. I lower my camera. Li Tong crashes into a pole, flips, then crashes to the ground. Sharon shrieks. We run over to him. All the needles in his body have impaled him. A thousand rivulets of blood have veered out like roots.
“Li Tong,” Sharon calls. “Are you okay? Li Tong!”
But I can already tell he’s not breathing.
The gruff guide comes in, screaming at the top of her lungs. She’s hysterical and though I can’t understand her, it’s o
bvious her rage is directed at Sharon.
“We should get out of here,” I whisper.
“Why?”
“Let’s get out of here,” I repeat.
“But…”
A group of the park people surround us. I grab Sharon’s hand and bolt. We run past tents, past the buildings. A throng of them is in front of us. I take a quick left. There’s several alleys and they’re all filled with angry denizens who swarm us.
Ropes are tied around our hands and legs. We’re carried like mincemeat for swine. The guide is barking orders. I can hear some of the men saying, “She killed Li Tong,” and, “They tried to scam us.”
I don’t see where we’re going, but I smell it.
The river of shit.
Putrid, malodorous, acrid: pale adjectives for what hits us. I’m about to puke.
“Sharon!”
“What?”
“Hold your breath!”
A hurtle, flashes of mobs, and then I’m surrounded by crap and oil and chemicals I can’t imagine. I’ve physically blocked my nostrils and the smell is still hammering my skull. There’s raucous laughter and serious admonishments, “Don’t ever come back!!!”
It’s five minutes of hell and putrescence. The communal canal of piss and diapers is a viscous morass that stymies movement, globules of excrement bunching together like diarrhea quasars. I do my best to ignore the fact that my flesh feels like it’s melting, that my legs could drop off any second, wading as fast as I can.
When we emerge on the other side, Sharon looks surprisingly placid.
“You okay?” I ask.
“You lose your camera?” she asks back.
I nod.
“When my dad was studying feces, his shoes were ruined since he walked in crap the whole time. One of the prisoners gave him his own shoes. My father was so grateful, he dedicated the book to him. But my dad never found out what happened to the guy.”
“Are those the shoes you’re looking for?”
“When I was a little girl, I hated those shoes because they smelled so bad. So when he was sleeping, I threw them away. He cried for a whole week after that.”
She stares at the park with melancholy eyes.
“We have a long walk ahead of us,” I say.
“He blamed it on a robber, but after he died, I found his journal. The whole time, he knew it was me, but he never got mad at me. Never said a word.”
I put my arm around her. Our sheathes of shit mix. She grips my hand tightly. We walk in silence the whole way back.
The Political Misconception of Getting Fired
I.
My mom always talked about how her great-grandfather fought in the Opium Wars against the British Empire. Zhou Liao charged a battalion of musketeers with a sword when everyone else fled. Even though he was shot to pieces, he laughed all the way to his grave. Posthumously, he was commemorated as a hero who died with honor: if more soldiers had been like him, no way would the Chinese have lost the war.
Growing up, I heard this story about a million times and I never could get the thought, What the hell was he thinking? out of my head. I mean, I get symbolism in one’s actions, but wasn’t there a smarter way of going about it? And I thought the Chinese invented gunpowder. Why didn’t Zhou Liao combust the powder to take a few Brits with him?
Maybe because my mom was in love with illusions or the people who chased after them, she married my father. My father failed at every job he tried and the worse part was, he could never admit it. Disappointment sapped his vigor and his heart ended up giving out like a worn-out sieve. He died in the middle of the day working in a clerk’s office surrounded by kids a third his age.
I wish it didn’t make me so depressed thinking about him typing away on an old Commodore computer, the way the corporation engaged in the emblematic crushing of the soul. I worked for a large IT corporation called SolTech. But unlike my father, oblivious to everything around him, I was hyper-sensitive. I spent nights worrying about my position and gathered with co-workers to bitch about our jobs. Aggravated by wives who wanted E!-televised homes, we hid our apprehensions, worshipped table etiquette, and masqueraded as Michelin food snobs, the big annual salary with a bonus keeping us more effectively leashed than the chained mace of an Inquisitor’s religious wrath.
It was in my ninth year at SolTech when I got an email from an old friend who found me through Facebook: June Guan, love of how many lives, a moth ablaze in the congealing flames of a frozen fire, my unforgiven sin, my brittle, broken soul. I was in love with her in high school. Did she have a precursor? She did, but… what the hell am I talking about? I barely spoke to her. I was just your typical high school nerd lusting after girls and wanting sex without knowing what it really was. She didn’t even realize I existed. In the four years I was in high school, she only said my name, Byron Zhou, once, because she was asking for help with her homework. We chatted a few times about the future during AP Lit, but that was it. I’d spoken more with our production assistant at work than I had the love of my youth. And yet, I knew everything about her: who she dated, how many members were in her family. Funny how stalkerish high school attraction could be.
So I was surprised when she suggested we meet up. I agreed heartily, scouring her profile to see if she was still single.
I met June at a fusion café, a trendy place with its combination of Asians and neon. She was comely rather than striking, serene rather than dynamic, a mix of Chinese and Dutch ancestors. She was nowhere near as pretty as I’d remembered her, with a plump attractiveness and a gaudy flowery dress that made me embarrassed about my childhood infatuation.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi!” she said, waving her hand enthusiastically. “How are you?”
“I’m great. You?”
“I’m great too. I love this restaurant. I absolutely recommend their spaghetti sushi broccoli hamburger.”
“I was actually eyeing the pesto chow mein sashimi.”
“Ehhh,” she said, shaking her hand. “It’s all right.”
I ordered it nevertheless. She picked a sake martini.
“Do you remember in high school you read books all the time?” she asked. “You talked about aliens and black holes and the Loch Ness?”
“Vaguely.”
“Do you believe in UFOs?”
“You mean like unidentified flying objects?” I asked. She nodded. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Why?”
“I was recently abducted by one.”
I burst into laughter, especially since she had such a somber look on her face.
“You don’t believe me?” she asked.
“Are you being serious?”
She lifted the side of her neck to reveal a nasty scar.
“The aliens did this to me,” she answered.
“The aliens?”
“I woke up one night and I felt this really bright orange light. It was creepy how orange it was because it wasn’t orange like an orange, but this eerie radioactive orange that seemed like it was from a different world.”
“Okay.”
“It was actually healing me. I just found out I had cervical cancer, but after the light, it was completely healed,” she said. “The doctors couldn’t believe it.”
“Your cancer was gone?”
“Yep. When the aliens returned a couple months later, I wanted to thank them. But it got really weird.”
“What do you mean?”
“There were shadows in the windows and I couldn’t see any of them but they seemed huge and they were shining their lights everywhere. And then I was in their craft or something, because I couldn’t control where I went, but I was moving. My mind went blank and when I woke up, I was in an Alaskan forest.” She took out a used airplane ticket stub. “See, it says Alaska. That’s proof that it happened.” I checked and the ticket did read Alaska to LAX.
“Do you remember what happened when you were abducted?” I asked.
“No, but I had scars all along my s
tomach. I’ve been doing research and I read how they like to grow fetuses inside a womb and cut it out. I was gone five days and I don’t remember a thing. I know it’s crazy. No one believes me, but it really happened…”
When the food arrived, she picked the spaghetti up with her bare hands, dropped it because it was hot, swirled it into her mouth straight off the table.
“It’s okay to use your fork,” I said.
“I know, I know, but I had a friend from Mongolia who told me you lose your connection with food that way.” She picked up her broccoli, swallowed the whole piece, and chewed loudly. Her mouth was covered in sauce as she asked, “How come you’re not eating?”
“I had a late lunch,” I said, having lost my appetite.
“Do you mind if I have some of yours?”
She grabbed a huge chunk off my plate before I could respond and wolfed it down.
“I told you the chow mein isn’t that good,” she said, wagging her finger at me.
Underneath the table, I texted everyone I knew, Call me back ASAP.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look a little nervous.”
“I’m fine,” I replied. “I just ate too much.”
“You have room for dessert though, right?”
“I’m not really a dessert person.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like sweets that much.”
“Dessert is essential to any meal. They have the best zucchini chocolate soufflé here. It only takes one hour to make and they put this garlic salt all over it. It makes your breath stink for like five hours, but it’s soooo worth it.”
“I…”
“Excuse me,” she said calling the waiter. “Can we get the zucchini chocolate soufflé?”
We spent the next half-hour chatting about trivia: What is the soundtrack of your life? If the world ran out of water, what would be your drink of choice? What’s the weirdest word you’ve ever heard? And my favorite, if you were reincarnated as a plant, which would it be?
“Cactus,” she said, “because they can live in super heat, have spikes all over to protect themselves, and store water inside them.”
Watering Heaven Page 7