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.
I’m not disappointed since it will just be the two of us until Sharon reminds me of our goaclass="underline" 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.