Chapter Nine

This is the day it hits me square in the big American nose. I can feel it coming. I’m leaning into it, a lifetime’s experience having established just how long one can paddle blithely up de’ Nile before the crocodile surfaces beneath the boat. Whether that will turn out to have much or little to do with recent errors in judgment, as opposed to those of yore, probably matters not at all. It is, at least, a comfort to know that all I have to do is paddle a wee bit farther before the answers come quite obligingly to me.

This is situational depression, I tell myself, abetted by the laconic three-day rain that has re-enlivened old Kunming scents and left my very soul to question what is sweat and what precipitation, what ambient hydrogen sulfate and what just the Kunming film.

As the drizzle seems to have abated for the moment, I pause at a street corner to wrestle my double-jointed umbrella closed. Not easily done with one hand. As I struggle pitifully, a gap-toothed man in a Chicago Bulls cap studies my face from about nine inches away, as rapt and unselfconscious as if watching two dogs screw in the park. Now another man joins him, leaning forward seemingly to count my nose hairs. Now the two men turn to discuss.

Kunming, one more horridly huge and hugely horrid Han city, is the capital of Yunnan Province and home to two million people innocent of additional options. It is home, as well, to a functioning X-ray machine. Thus, finally, three-plus days after one very nasty fall from grace, my right hand is now embraced by a white plaster cast as clean as the dreams of an unfevered child. No one has signed it. I feel so unpopular.

Simple clean break, I was told, and thanks to Dr. Yang’s poultice, completely unknitted.

As I cannot possibly close this umbrella and the gap-toothed fellow and his friend are too deep in conversation to assist, I give up and cross the intersection against the light, hopeful that my steps will bear me in the general direction of edible. The charcoal grill at the overcrowded and under-cleaned Kunming train station didn’t particularly beckon. Just beside the counter was a pile of garbage as high as a horse’s back. All around lay damp, miserable Chinese elbow-to-elbow on blankets and newspapers like war dead, most of them awaiting the same squalid train, a hard sleeper to Guangzhou outbound in two and a half hours. Until then, I get to skulk along these pitted and rain-fouled streets, clinging to my double-jointed umbrella and muttering Bro’ Foucault beneath my breath while scouting for a semi-hygienic restaurant or a particularly nasty massage parlor, whichever comes first. Not that I haven’t learned my lesson.

Then, it may have been a situational lesson.

It hurts, by the way. The hand beneath the handsome white cast. More so all the time, as my beleaguered liver seems finally to have cleared all traces of pain-dulling substances—which begs the question, why do I still awake each morning with no clue as to where I am, not even the continent whereupon I dip among these inimitable dip slopes. On this particular morning it was at least five minutes before I constructed a line of logic and ten before I was willing to buy in. Just because something runs in a straight line doesn’t make it true, no more than being unable to locate my meds for three consecutive days means they are lost.

I wish I had a little more of that sticky black opium.

A hard sleeper, I have learned, is a cramped bunkhouse on steel wheels. There are no assigned bunks, thus “boarding” is far too kind a word for what happens when the train hisses to a near-halt. Hopefully I’ll wind up with a lower berth with no all-night card games left or right—the players sit on your bed—and no additional war wounds. From Guangzhou I’ll take a first-class train to Shenzhen where Lillian and Tree now await placement for their concurrent one-year sentences in separate but equal high schools. There I shall inquire of the higher angels of Tree’s nature as to when and where I’m to receive that passel of pages that our little strumpet Truman seems now to be dangling, and for which I’ve evidently bartered my immortal soul. Personally I don’t care whether I’m to comfort the world’s chuul-ren or deliver them on a skewer. That New York publisher is practically panting for the final chapter of The End of Day and I’m at pains to come up with a fresh excuse for not delivering it. Meanwhile I’d do well to place another parcel of Chinese-y with Miriam and quickly, before she disremembers my airfare.

Magazine Mariposa is a tax shelter for an arms manufacturer. Grenade launchers. I haven’t mentioned this to Lillian, nor should you. It’s a situation. Life’s full of them.

And I should petition Bernie for another little bottle of syzygy. I mean another little bottle of meds. Bernie writes me the good pills, and I get him into the B parties in New York. Actually they’re the C parties, but Bernie doesn’t know that. Not that I’m particularly disturbed just this moment. Situationally depressed is all. One point nine, maybe one nine five, is all. The coping mechanisms kick in at two.

This particular dreary stretch of Kunming seems long on butchers and sheet-metal shops and short on sanitary eating establishments, say nothing of particularly nasty massage parlors. I’d settle just now for a clean one. Chinese men are fond of paying young women to stroll up and down the backs of their legs—which explains the plumbing above Chinese massage tables, I’m happy to have learned. The masseuse clings to the pipes while making Wan Fan Shan squeal like a widdle pig. Afterward comes an hour of the most exquisite pressure-point torture followed by the kind of spirited steaming-towel rub-down that Chairman Mao preferred to bathing the last two decades of his life. Which is exactly the kind of vector Bro’ Foucault warned us about, not that we were listening.

We should have been.

Whether we hang our hat on circumstance or our balls out on chance, there’s still this seething background murmur that one can but notice between his/her little wheezes, his/her lame saxophone rationalizations while struggling one-handed with a two-handed umbrella. Or whilst going through the pockets of one’s backpack the thirty-third time, unsure whether, when last we triple-checked for the meds, they were there, clearly there, but we somehow failed to recognize them.

I just spent an hour in a soggy internet café where I checked my various email accounts, alternative realities, faux realities, and all such like. They were all fine. Lillian notified me that Shenzhen has palm trees. A former associate reminded me that I owe him money. There was an email from Ralpho that provided a link to his article on “the real truth about globel [sic] warming.” Catastrophic climate change, says Ralpho, turns out to have less to do with petro emissions than biological ones. Human flatulence, we’re gradually learning, contains an organic compound that combines with elements of the upper atmosphere in a way that traps radiant heat like a black Lincoln Town Car. This information is being suppressed, says Ralpho, as there seems no real alternative to a massive die-off. So while the privileged few will hunker in their bunkers, the rest of us will be left to fart ourselves into oblivion. Happily, Ralpho’s article proposes a kinder solution, namely the establishment of two days per week—Tuesdays and Thursdays are suggested—when we all hold it. If everyone were to participate, emissions could be reduced by nearly thirty percent, which is not an insignificant amount. Refraining from the consumption of beans on those same days might go farther still, suggests Ralpho. Personally I think he was absent from school the day they taught Newton’s Fourth Law concerning the conservation of gaseous matter. Anyway, I’ve always held it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s my contribution.

Good thing I was unable to close my umbrella. The low clouds are once more beginning to ooze, to the chagrin of my bladder which is nearing the point of no return. China has no public restrooms—none at all—thus, the defining sensation of being in this country is an unending sorrowful cramp in the midsection, and as I have left the train station a dozen blocks behind, it seems time to embrace an eatery.

I pause amid the puddles to look both ways, and I briefly consider the three phone numbers moldering in my wallet. Please help this colorless foreign devil every courtesy. Too bad I don’t do telephones. Neither did e. e. cummings, as you may know. His feeling, and I understand utterly, was that if someone really wanted to speak to him, he had a front door with a serviceable bell. Still I can’t quite bring myself to throw those numbers away, nor the tattered note of introduction stuck fast to them. Tree would accuse me of harboring an intuition, but it’s likely more a case of undifferentiated fear. I’m less and less interested in separating these things out.

Her Tree-ness is excited, said Lillian’s email, as the movie version of Bi (rhymes with pee) Yu Nu’s latest book debuts tonight in Beijing amid rumors that the author himself may appear, ending three decades of speculation as to his identity. As tickets are impossible to come by, Tree plans to be part of the mob in front of the theater. A Room of Eyes. That’s the title of both the book and the movie. I once visited a room constructed entirely of antonyms. Eyes, no. But there seems to be a room for pretty much everything.

I pause in front of a small diner. It’s gloomy, fly-swirling, and oppressively wet, which probably makes it the finest restaurant in all of Kunming. Stepping inside, I find myself hydroplaning on deposits of cooking oil from the Xin dynasty. I steady myself on a table and its plastic cover, precipitating a sssschlllp sound when I peel my hand off. Taking a seat, I discover that the menu is just as sticky. I order a beer and a number-one, whatever that is, and mime to the waitress that I’d very much like to wash my hands.

Follow me, she signals.

I follow, grease-skating, through a tiny door and its frayed curtain into a wretched hole of a kitchen. Amid piles of unwashed pots and pans is a metal sink beneath a dirty rubber hose. The startled expression of the cook informs me that I’m the first patron to ever ask to wash his hands. My present needs call for an actual restroom, however, so I grudgingly produce the requisite word, the only Mandarin one I know.

Follow me.

Tree blames it all on little René Descartes. From the red tides of Tobago to the blue moons of Kentucky, from our tiny beads of sweat as we strain against the multiplication tables in fourth grade, to smart bombs that aren’t quite smart enough to not go off—it all goes onto little René’s account. The conquest of the world, he was told in a dream, was to be accomplished through number. Not integer, mind you. It was an angel who hot-whispered these flawed words, fluttering down to the edge of town to pop the clutch and send the world fishtailing into Act Three of either farce or tragedy, you choose. As though there remains much of a choice, dear ones. Neither x axis, nor y, let alone that zany z, proffers a place to lay weary head on cold night, you may have noticed—and where exactly do we go with these issues, having saved neither the original packaging nor the sales slip. But never mind. The waitress is leading me slip-sliding back through the diner and out once more to the sidewalk from whence I came. Giggling in the rain, she points across the street, forefinger indicating an entire hectare of jumbled doors and signs, not one of which even suggests a restroom, and I use my best Charlie Chaplin to complain about this. She just keeps giggling and pointing.

Disgusted, I muck my way back inside to fetch my backpack and double-jointed umbrella, waitress all the while shouting insults at what appears to be a teenage boy asleep beneath a table. He emerges stupidly to fuss with his hair, which had evidently been a spiked Mohawk at some earlier moment of the day, now resembling nothing so much as a sun-dried dead animal. The waitress, still yammering, shoves the boy toward me and a moment later I’m following him across the street.

The rain comes down heavier. Torpid teen tosses his head, and the spikes send off shimmering arcs of droplets, thin rivulets meanwhile running down narrow neck to disappear beneath black vinyl to seek the earth’s center along the path of least developmental disability. He’s wearing forty zippers at the least. In front of each ear meanwhile hangs a thin lock of hair in hopeful suggestion of sideburns. Despite the downpour, he is stubbornly unhurried, sauntering, hands in pockets, and why hasten through a world wherein one moment you’re snoring beneath a table and the next leading a monochrome giant through the stinking rain, no difference between the texture of the day and that of your undies. Which I think speaks to the growing tendency among retirement-age banking executives to sniff their secretaries’ office chairs just after they’ve left in a good mood, for lunch. Marvel not that Bro’ Foucault says unto you: the world we view is nothing like the one we inhabit but only its shadow, a timid footnote to discourses among gods far too fair to imagine, nor do they imagine us save when in sudden and dire need of a little pussy wussy. All of reality, its flotsam and jetsam, its unsigned scorecards and unfinished masters theses, all of this improbable hurdy-gurdy oompah occurs not at center stage at all, nor even off-off Broadway but in some fly-swirling diner in a neighborhood where the taxis don’t slow down. Which perhaps puts it a little negatively. But I’m pushing a one point nine. Maybe one nine five.

Obediently following zipper-boy into soggy alleyway, I’m careful to hold the double-jointed umbrella directly above the new plaster cast. Otherwise, I take it, we have so much oatmeal without any real description of a spoon. Abruptly the boy stops among chicken droppings and dog spare parts at the foot of an improbably massive staircase of rusted steel, at its top a moldering wooden third-floor balcony. He points toward the balcony, which features an anonymous door at either end.

I mime the question, “Up then left, or up then right?”

The teenager nods soberly and continues to jab his forefinger toward the balcony.

Again, more emphatically: up then left? Or up then right?

The boy continues pointing upward, and even shoves me a little closer to the staircase as though I don’t quite see it yet.

With exquisite annoyance, I start up the metal stairs. Before reaching the top, I glance over my shoulder. Zippered teen is slouching away in the rain, having accomplished his worthy deed of the day. For a long moment, I stand panting just below the top of the stairs, looking out across the jumbled tiled rooftops of phantasmagorium eyesorium and suddenly it’s one of those unexpected crystalline travel moments. Annoyance gone, I discover myself panting above a sodden alley in Kunming, China, bladder cramping, raindrops tapping out an umbrella melody.

For a moment everything is transfigured.

Before leaving Lijiang, I convinced a reluctant Zhu to take me to the ruins of a Buddhist monastery on Paintbrush Mountain. “Is just some pile of stones,” said he. I told Zhu I was very fond of piles of stones. In truth I was tiring of the streets of Lijiang and its throngs of red-stockinged men with a hard-on for my best-kept secrets. Zhu and I endured a succession of mini-buses then a half-hour uphill hike through pine forest to… a pile of stones. I’m not sure what I’d expected. Wenfeng Monastery looked less like a historical site than a very recent demolition.

“What happened here?” I asked.

“Is Red Guard destroy it,” said Zhu.

“Ah. El Cultural Revolution.”

It wasn’t really a revolution, as you probably know, but a government-sanctioned lynch mob loosed against anyone / everyone whose thoughts were trending the wrong way. During the Cultural Revolution, a joke uttered over beers decades earlier could get you a life sentence. Having a brother-in-law who’d told such a joke could get you a public flogging. And if your next-door neighbor had laughed at the joke, you and he were forced to do the side-straddle hop.

“Red Guard is destroy many, many place. I know this,” said Zhu. The eyes behind the thick lenses searched my face. “When I am a young man, I am Red Guard.”

I turned to peer at my guide and interpreter. You don’t hear this admission every day.

“I am nineteen years old,” continued Zhu, “and I think Mao is some kind of god. Everybody is believe this. All of the school is closed, so nothing to do. Mao is tell all the young men go do something. You can have this nice uniform. Everybody says just go burn some bad books, so I do this. I take the uniform. After we burn the books, now somebody is say go to some temple. We go there, burn the temple. Now somebody say this man is say something bad. Everybody go to this man’s house. Is very wrong but you cannot stop it. You say something, tomorrow they come drag your mother and father on the ground.”

And force drugs up their cracks, or I miss my guess.

With a sigh, I step from the wet staircase onto the wooden balcony and approach the door at right, my bladder so swollen that my teeth hurt. Turning the knob, I peer inside at a gray-haired woman silently leading some thirty others in Taiji. I close the door at right.

The door at left is swollen from the rain. It drags as I push it. I peer down a dark hallway. The air inside seems oddly empty, no sounds at all nor any hint of the sharp odor that customarily announces a Chinese toilet. The building seems to be abandoned. Stepping inside, I find that the corridor extends in both directions. At one end is a large room suggestive of pointless meetings, at the other a row of doors, one of them partly open. I take a few steps and look inside the half-open door, discovering a janitor’s closet that features a low concrete basin designed to accommodate a mop. Actually this may be the finest public restroom in all of Kunming, I reason, approaching the mop basin and opening my fly. I wait for my cramping abdomen to unknot itself, gazing meanwhile at a three-pronged electrical outlet above the basin. Last night’s inelegant departure from the village of Baisha comes to mind.

It wasn’t entirely my fault.

Many Chinese hotels provide voltage adaptors, some of them—including the one in last night’s wayside inn—bearing inscrutable switches. I must have bumped it. Minor smoke damage was all, but management suggested that I continue my science experiments a little farther down the road.

My first Chinese fire drill. What you’d expect, for the most part. Lots of discussion.

Closing my fly, I reach for the faucet handle to rinse the mop basin and perhaps wash a little Kunming off my hands—and the handle breaks off in my hand. I stare at it for a moment then try to put it back on, and of course it doesn’t go back on. As I puzzle over this, a most unwelcome sound comes to my attention, that of a rain-swollen wooden door scraping against a floor, followed by two weighty footsteps.

Faucet handle still in hand, I listen for what seems a long time, hoping to hear additional footsteps fade to some distant part of the building, but there is no sound at all. Gradually it registers that the person standing motionless in the entry is listening as well. Listening for me.

I watched a television program in my room last night. Before the fire drill. I think it was a beauty contest. There must have been a hundred colorless Chinese women with long straight hair, all wearing the same white two-piece bathing suit. Each contestant walked to the front, bumped left then right, spun on the right heel, and walked away. It was the Miss Identical Pageant. Miss Instant Replay. Miss White Is Not My Color. Three-digit numbers had been pinned to the left hip of each contestant so they could tell themselves apart. Just look down at your number, honey. I don’t know who won the contest. There was a commercial break, after which a panel discussion appeared, government officials with reassuring smiles giving long, unhurried speeches that cascaded like mountain streams and fried lie detectors on the far side of Neptune. Maybe they were discussing how impossible it was to tell those women apart. That was when I first smelled the smoke.

The heavy footsteps continue. Fortunately they lead in the opposite direction, toward the meeting room. There they abruptly stop. Call me psychic, but I’ve no doubt that those two feet will quite soon turn in this direction. There’s only a moment to act. Instead I luxuriate in the sudden silence, finding it more content-laden than I might have reasonably expected. I feel qualitatively different. I try to name the difference but discover that I can’t recall how things were before.

Bad, most likely.

A floorboard creaks and then another. At this, three realizations appear in my mind in no particular order. One is, I’m holding a faucet handle in my left hand. Two, I may have tucked my meds into my heavy wool socks, which I’ve had no occasion to wear of late. The third thing that occurs to me is that people in Westerns get out of situations very like this one by throwing an object, a rock or a stick, whatever comes to hand, thus creating a diversion that bad guys find irresistible, sometimes turning and firing two or three bullets in the wrong direction entirely.

I toss the faucet handle through the open door.

I once saw an actual crocodile surface no farther away than the end of this paragraph. Miriam had evidently decided that the most economical way to get rid of me was to assign an article on any endangered species capable of unhinging its jaw. I was dispatched to East Africa with a pad and pencil and a camera lacking a functional zoom. Unfortunately for both Miriam and the crocodile, I was neither paddling nor swimming at the time but on the deck of a forty-three-foot Bayliner, where I was receiving the attentions of a young woman very nearly capable of unhinging hers. All at once, the yellow eyes of the croc were clearly in view. I tilted my head to one side and said, quite sagely I thought at the time, “I wish I had a little more of that sticky black opium.”

I watch the faucet handle crash against the side of the door frame, bounce a few times, and roll to a stop exactly at my feet.

Could I do that again? I want to ask, but that would give away my location.

As expected, the footsteps resume, aggressively loud now and growing ever more so. I decide that the best idea is to panic and dash wild-eyed into the hallway where—

I collide head-on with Julian Mancer. Our bulbous noses meet at dead-center of the hallway, and we each emit a surprised oomph. Panicked, I try to step around Julian Mancer, but the same idea occurs to him and we meet face-on once more. It’s the Keystone Doos. Finally, my mirror image turns away and flees toward the center of the abandoned building. I make for the fire escape, taking the rusting steps two at a time. Aiming myself in the direction of the diner, I make haste to put a little distance between myselves.

I never knew how silly I look in epaulets.