“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 obvious 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.