A group of old men come on stiffly posed in Mao suits.
She sees soldiers in the darkness who come jogging through the streets. She is mesmerized by rows and rows of jogging troops and those riot guns they carry.
Then people being routed in the dark, great crowds rent and split, the way a crowd folds away, leaving a space that looks confused.
They show high officials in Mao suits.
The soldiers jogging in the streets, entering the vast area of the daylit square although it is night now. There is something about troops jogging out of streets and avenues into a great open space. They are jogging in total drag step almost lazily with those little guns at port arms and the crowd breaking apart.
Then the portrait of Mao in the daylit square with paint spattered on his head.
The troops come jogging in total cadence in that lazy drag step, row after row, and she wants it to keep on going, keep showing the rows of jogging troops with their old-fashioned helmets and toylike guns.
They show a smoldering corpse in the street.
There are dead bodies attached to fallen bicycles, flames shooting in the dark. The bodies are still on the bikes and there are other bicyclists looking on, some wearing sanitary masks. You could actually say a pile of bodies and many of the dead still seated on their bikes.
What is the word, dispersed? The crowd dispersed by jogging troops who move into the great space.
One crowd replaced by another.
It is the preachment of history, whoever takes the great space and can hold it longest. The motley crowd against the crowd where everyone dresses alike.
They show the portrait of Mao up close, a clean new picture, and he has those little mounds of hair that bulge out his head and the great wart below his mouth that she tries to recall if the wart appears on the version Andy drew with a pencil that she has on the wall in the bedroom at home. Mao Zedong. She likes that name all right. But it is funny how a picture. It is funny how a picture what?
She hears a car alarm go off in the street.
She changes channels and a million Chinese come on in the daylit square. She is hoping to catch more shots of jogging troops. They show the bicycle dead, a soldier's body hanging from a girder, the row of old officials in Mao suits.
What does it mean that all these old men are dressed in Mao suits and the people in the square are all in shirtsleeves?
The motley crowd dispersed.
They show the great state portrait in the deep distance and she is pretty certain there is no wart in Andy's drawing.
There is something about troops entering a square, jogging row after row in lazy cadence. She keeps changing channels to see the troops.
They show the bicycle dead.
The daylit square comes on again. It is funny how a picture shows the true person even when it is incomplete.
And in the street when she goes out later there is a taxi that has skidded into a parked car and a third car's alarm is sounding. People stand around eating and watching. The sodium-vapor lamps bend over the incandescent scene and in the vertigo of intermingled places, the great square in Beijing and the wind-smoked downtown street and the space in the squat building where the TV sits, she stands peering at the crushed car, looking for upside-down bodies and blood dashed everywhere.
They went by. Spare a little change. Went by. Still love you. Spare a little change. Went by. Still love you.
She followed a man who looked like Bill but he turned out on further inspection to be not a writer type at all.
She took the gentlest possible care of the food-encrusted spoon from the art gallery. She kept it on a shelf, clearing some of the books so it could sit undisturbed and in open sight but also out of the sun. She was worried about the food. If the food was somehow touched or rubbed by another object or if it was softened by warm air, it might crumble off the spoon and this would be a defacement she didn't think she could bear. The spoon and food were one.
She spoke sincerely to a couple in the park, a man and woman textured in soot. They sat on a mattress inside their box hut. Karen squatted at the opening, her fingertips touching the ground, and there was a plastic bag that was the entrance curtain sort of draped over her shoulder.
Our task is to prepare for the second coming.
The world will be a universal family.
We are the spiritual children of the man I talked about from far away.
We are protected by the total power of our true father.
We are the total children.
All doubt will vanish in the arms of total control.
Omar Neeley was fourteen. She walked with him past the Ukrainian Jesus on the church facade. They walked past the AIDS hotel. She realized she didn't know where he lived or if he had parents or siblings. She used to think siblings were strictly white and middle-class due to something in the nature of the word. They walked past the black cube sculpture that was balanced on a point. It had ten men sleeping beneath it with their shopping bags and shopping carts alongside, with crutches lying beside some of them, some arms and legs in casts. Omar was supposed to help her carry plasterboard left at a demolition site. Take it to the park. But down one of the factory streets two men in undersized hats came up, those little fedora hats and muscle T-shirts. She felt the contact in the air, the streak of meaning that takes the blood out of your face. But all they did was talk. They talked to Omar in figures of speech she couldn't make out. Then they walked along with him and he never looked back, and they walked and he went with them. What about my plasterboard. One of them talked to him with a hand on his arm and he walked along with that jangling gait, big for his age.
People with supermarket carts. When did these things come out of the stores and into the streets? She saw these things everywhere, pushed, dragged, lived in, fought over, unwheeled, bent, rolling haywire, filled with living trivia, the holistic dregs of everything if that is correctly put. She talked to the woman in the plastic bag, offering to get a shopping cart for her, which is something I might be able to do. The woman spoke out at her from inside the bag, spoke in raven song, a throttled squawk that Karen tried to understand. She realized she understood almost no one here, no one spoke in ways she'd ever heard before. The whole rest of her life had been one way of hearing and now she needed to learn another. It was a different language completely, unwritable and interior, the rag-speak of shopping carts and plastic bags, the language of soot, and Karen had to listen carefully to the way the woman dragged a line of words out of her throat like hankies tied together and then she tried to go back and reconstruct.
The woman seemed to be saying, "They have buses in this city that they crouch for wheelchairs. Give us ramps for people living in the street. I want buses that they crouch for us."
She seemed to say, "I want my own blind dog that it's allowed in the movies."
But maybe it was something else completely.
There are people gathering in clusters everywhere, coming out of mud houses and tin-roof shanties and sprawling camps and meeting in some dusty square to march together to a central point, calling out a name, collecting many others on the way, some are running, some in bloodstained shirts, and they reach a vast open space that they fill with their pressed bodies, a word or name, calling out a name under the chalk sky, millions, chanting.
She said, "Let me into vibration" or "Get me annihilation," and when Karen brought her hot food on a pie plate she took it into her bag and disappeared.
Brita came home and they sat eating a meal that Karen carefully prepared. She had cleaned the place and packed her own small belongings in a tote bag she set by the door, to show she was ready to leave anytime the word was given.
Brita was impressive, she was frantically lagged and talkative, charged with a stark energy that had the center drained out and was all restless edges. She looked hollow-boned and beautiful like someone back from glaring tropic solitude.