Chapter Ten

My first encounter with music must surely have occurred very early on, monaural strains drifting into crib from kitchen radio, or however it was. I do recall one timeless moment—I was sitting on a chill black-and-white tiled floor—when I became aware of an active organizing principle materializing around my tenderest of regions and imploring them to surrender all notion of order and consequence unto an entirely novel scheme. The experience was too altogether abstract to do anything with except register a category of hoodoo later to be labeled music, or what I then supposed music to be. It was in point of fact recorded music, the experiential difference being roughly the same as that between eating a cheeseburger and eating a photo of a cheeseburger.

I wish I were eating a photo of the number-one. As far as I can tell, it’s an omelet with a side of boiled dumplings. The brown bottle of beer that came with it was warm, but it was beer. So was the second one. The third one seemed to be kind of like beer, too. Numbers four through seven haven’t specifically registered, but my hands don’t feel quite so dirty now and I no longer feel bad about ignoring the phone numbers in my wallet.

I think I’m adjusting rather well to what just happened in that abandoned building, whatever it was and whomever it happened to. You hear the occasional metaphorical reference to unexpected encounters with one’s evil twin, or dark side, shadow-self, whatever. I liked it better when it was a metaphor. This wasn’t even a real good simile. That was a person in there. I felt his nose against mine. I smelled his Altoid. Whoever it was, if not for the grey eyes, he would have been a better me than me. What remains unclear is whether I have just met my evil twin or he has just met his.

I’m going to check my wool socks for those meds.

There are stories about twins separated at birth and placed with families on opposite coasts, only to meet head-on as adults in circumstances as unlikely as today’s or quite nearly, thereafter to learn they’d both married a woman named Agnes with Rett syndrome. Still in all, having viewed Lillian’s and my birth records on more than one occasion, I think we can be relatively certain that our mother did not drop more than two offspring on the occasion of Lil’s and my birth. Which leaves us where?

And then there’s the matter of the envelope.

When I returned to this sticky table, awaiting me was an uncapped bottle of warm beer, a saucer of limp noodle crisps, a plastic jigger of soy sauce with enough MSG and corn sweetener to disable a nuclear submarine, and a sealed letter-sized envelope of exceptional quality with my name laser-printed across the front in twelve-point Courier New. I haven’t opened it. I’m waiting for the right moment.

Zippered teenager is sleeping again, his upper body sprawled across a table. There’s something stuck in his hair. It looks like a price sticker. At another table, an old man buries his face in a bowl of noodles. He’s making more or less the same sounds as a Bangkok airport hooker with Rett syndrome.

Chairman Mao once tried waiting for the right moment but found it entirely onerous. So many gratifications so near to hand, and here he’d survived the Long March for what, a grey wool suit? So, as his right hand stirred the egg-flower soup, the left one unbuttoned his fly and the misshapen map-of-China face twisted into something like an appeasing grin as the three young women across the table tittered uncertainly, still believing they were the Chairman’s ballroom dance partners for the evening—but where were the musicians? And why did the Chairman smile so as he lowered the warm soup bowl to his lap? And what did come first, anyway, the flower or the egg?

But easy answers are for easy minds. This shadow was given me for company, not some other wastrel, and it is I who must sing that the moon may reel.

…Because the moon does not know how to drink wine,
She has given me this shadow for company.
So let our mirth keep pace with the spring!
I sing and the moon begins to reel,
I dance and the shadow lurches grotesquely…

I lift the envelope, and the world tilts a little to the right. Too thin to contain ready cash, I decide, which doesn’t preclude the possibility of a nice cashier’s check. Not that I’m ready to assume at this tender point that the current envelope connects in any way to that proffered in a Beijing steam brothel, but for a moment I let myself wonder just how well-financed this hypothetical research project might be, and whether the ethical pain associated with accepting money for something I’ve no intention of actually doing might not be easier to bear than that of swindling good prose from a dead queer, or at least giving it a really nice try before both knees are shattered with a corked Louisville Slugger in the warehouse district along Old Summer Ave.

Good question, however lengthy, but one better suited to a mind that does not slip like a loose bicycle chain. I expect any moment to awaken from all this in a lumpy bed beside a barred window, trinket merchant nodding just beyond, no paired silhouettes of shoed feet at door, no horrors to recall nor fail to recall, no alternative selves to go bump in the broad and scent-enlivened afternoon, no Bro’ Fou’ theorems to boldly cast forth then methodically reel back in, nothing at all to hold on Tuesdays and Thursdays, nor any room of eyes to shed self-witnessed tears in statuary silence in that great getting-up morning fare-thee-well oh fare-thee-well.

Lillian says Tree just broadcast her first radio show from Shenzhen. Shatrina informed a spellbound world that China is, as expected, the place where it all be going down, whatever it turns out to be. She said a lot of former Atlanteans are milling about here, hoping to avert the same kind of disaster as before. “Uh, Atlantis didn’t exist,” I told Tree not so long ago. “It’s been proven by plate tectonics.”

“Everything existed,” replied Lillian, to whom I wasn’t speaking. “That’s been proven, too.”

“You’re always talking about rooms, Jules,” concurred Tree. “There’s one for everything, right?”

I told her I wasn’t sure about an Atlantis room, besides which wouldn’t you, like, need a lot of extra towels?

“Pi,” I say to the waitress (rhymes with Bi) and she dashes to the kitchen for another brown bottle of warm beer while I return my attention to the disturbingly perfect envelope on the plastic table cover. Most likely there’s nothing inside but two plane tickets to Chicago and a gift certificate to Luby’s. To hell with these people and their shoddy recruitment techniques. Next time I squat a Chinese toilet, I’m quite sure that Jerry Scribner’s head will emerge from my ass to inform me that it was not he who chose this meeting place but if I would just excrete his briefcase, I might find that it contains a most interesting proposal.

The last really interesting proposal I received came late yesterday as I bade farewell to Zhu just outside the Lijiang train station. He was still in his little pout and so avoided eye contact until the very moment of goodbye when, as he tucked my money into his wallet, he extracted a small card and handed it to me.

“I carry this always to wait for some time I need it. I think you need it more.”

I gazed at a purple and gold image of Guan Yin, Goddess of Mercy and Inflammable et cetera. She stood on a luminous cloud, the ribbons in her hair flowing in a breeze that I could not detect. On the reverse side of the card were three long strings of Chinese characters in the usual dull red. The card was stiff, as though a metal core lay beneath the high-gloss paper, which was worn around the edges as though it had ridden in Zhu’s wallet for some time. For a moment, I was thrown back upon the careworn deck of cards with which my one grandmother had often amused herself at a folding table as I hovered out-of-body nearby, pondering Fermat’s Last Theorem and my own dread mortality.

Zhu frowned at the card I cradled in my hand. “Is for make the miracle. Just put on your hand and ask the miracle something. My daughter give it on the Spring Festival some time. Every day I think don’t need the miracle today, maybe need it more tomorrow, so just go take the walk, do something feel better.”

Zhu’s eyes met mine timidly. “You remember me same time you use the miracle, maybe make two miracle.” He shrugged. “Or maybe just don’t do nothing.”

Returning his wallet to his pocket, Zhu pointed his baseball cap into the late afternoon sun and vanished in the glare.

I think I over-tipped him. It’s so hard to know.

Again I stare at the white envelope and wonder whether this might be the right moment. I hesitate, knowing all too well the consequences of drawing when holding might better serve. What nourishes one instant may very well kill you the next, which Fermat never understood and I learned only at great cost, humbled, hounded, and harried practically to the point of tears and only because of a boyish love for numbers and one or two bad spots of luck and having fallen in with the wrong crowd.

Rich people who gamble.

It was very nearly miraculous that I had gained access to that particular society of degenerates at all, but I tumbled through the sash of an improbable window of circumstance—a rich person who gambles having just passed out on his sofa, his last coherent words: you go. I thought he was proposing a discussion on the relative merits of inexpensive East European automobiles, but as the man fell to snoring I caught the glint of something metallic in his right hand. Curious, I extracted a handsome gold-inlayed invitation. The man’s name—I can’t recall it now—was engraved into the card, along with an address in Memphis’s most exclusive neighborhood. Okay, Memphis’s only exclusive neighborhood. There was also the current day’s date and the time 11 p.m. I looked at my watch. It was twenty till eleven. At that precise moment, a sharp knock came at the door where I discovered a formally-dressed limo driver. He glanced at the card in my hand and said, “Are you ready, sir?”

I said yes.

Always say yes.

Lillian knows nothing of this particular matter, despite her charming approach to wondering what I’m thinking, which is to suck it out of my brain with a Dyson DC07 vacuum. Co-semi-existent is the word her shrink prefers to codependent in our case, and he’s one of the few who’s gotten it right. Imagine being tethered for life to someone no more free than yourself to be the sum of her constituent parts. You’re walking around in each other’s genomes. You’re entangled kite strings on a March afternoon. You’re the funhouse mirrors minus all the fun. You’re the whipping boy and the whipping post, oh such a fine story for olives and toast.

It’s the right moment.

I slam down my longneck on the plastic table cover, and the waitress’s head swivels. At the same instant, the old man looks up from his noodles, and Fermat attempts to turn over in his grave but lacks the requisite smooth muscle mass. Only zippered teenager doesn’t stir. I lift the envelope and give the expensive paper stock an appreciative sniff. Mitsumata, I decide, though the weight is a bit more Schurman. I may yet discover that I am lucid-napping in my garage apartment in Memphis, nothing at all in my hand but my favorite constituent part. But it seems so real. We all live within the flickering shadows of Plato’s cave, or at least time-share with the Wilsons, wondering whether we out-picture the picture or the picture out-pictures us, as though it matters one way or the other at the end of the billing cycle. All is tethered. All is other than. Something somewhere rears its head, or nine of them, and not one of us is free to not taste its sour breath in our mouths. Screw Fermat. He invented something that fits absolutely nowhere, whereas—and here is the juicy nougat center or so it seems after those warm brown bottles of pi—I fit everywhere.

Especially naked.

One yank on the silk pull-thread, and the envelope parts effortlessly, revealing a single tri-folded page. No check. No tickets. No gift certificate to Luby’s. Just a single folded sheet of paper which I pop open. One sentence in twelve-point Courier New:

“China is no longer safe for you and your sister.”

I wave for my check. It’s pointless, I know, to consider such matters within the context of a moment no more finely textured than this—the word brackwurst suggests itself—but at this juncture, one hypothesis seems difficult to dismiss. China may no longer be safe for myself and my sister.