Putrid, malodorous, acrid: pale adjectives for what hits us. I’m about to puke.
“Sharon!”
“What?”
“Hold your breath!”
A hurtle, flashes of mobs, and then I’m surrounded by crap and oil and chemicals I can’t imagine. I’ve physically blocked my nostrils and the smell is still hammering my skull. There’s raucous laughter and serious admonishments, “Don’t ever come back!!!”
It’s five minutes of hell and putrescence. The communal canal of piss and diapers is a viscous morass that stymies movement, globules of excrement bunching together like diarrhea quasars. I do my best to ignore the fact that my flesh feels like it’s melting, that my legs could drop off any second, wading as fast as I can.
When we emerge on the other side, Sharon looks surprisingly placid.
“You okay?” I ask.
“You lose your camera?” she asks back.
I nod.
“When my dad was studying feces, his shoes were ruined since he walked in crap the whole time. One of the prisoners gave him his own shoes. My father was so grateful, he dedicated the book to him. But my dad never found out what happened to the guy.”
“Are those the shoes you’re looking for?”
“When I was a little girl, I hated those shoes because they smelled so bad. So when he was sleeping, I threw them away. He cried for a whole week after that.”
She stares at the park with melancholy eyes.
“We have a long walk ahead of us,” I say.
“He blamed it on a robber, but after he died, I found his journal. The whole time, he knew it was me, but he never got mad at me. Never said a word.”
I put my arm around her. Our sheathes of shit mix. She grips my hand tightly. We walk in silence the whole way back.
The Political Misconception of Getting Fired
I.
My mom always talked about how her great-grandfather fought in the Opium Wars against the British Empire. Zhou Liao charged a battalion of musketeers with a sword when everyone else fled. Even though he was shot to pieces, he laughed all the way to his grave. Posthumously, he was commemorated as a hero who died with honor: if more soldiers had been like him, no way would the Chinese have lost the war.
Growing up, I heard this story about a million times and I never could get the thought, What the hell was he thinking? out of my head. I mean, I get symbolism in one’s actions, but wasn’t there a smarter way of going about it? And I thought the Chinese invented gunpowder. Why didn’t Zhou Liao combust the powder to take a few Brits with him?
Maybe because my mom was in love with illusions or the people who chased after them, she married my father. My father failed at every job he tried and the worse part was, he could never admit it. Disappointment sapped his vigor and his heart ended up giving out like a worn-out sieve. He died in the middle of the day working in a clerk’s office surrounded by kids a third his age.
I wish it didn’t make me so depressed thinking about him typing away on an old Commodore computer, the way the corporation engaged in the emblematic crushing of the soul. I worked for a large IT corporation called SolTech. But unlike my father, oblivious to everything around him, I was hyper-sensitive. I spent nights worrying about my position and gathered with co-workers to bitch about our jobs. Aggravated by wives who wanted E! — televised homes, we hid our apprehensions, worshipped table etiquette, and masqueraded as Michelin food snobs, the big annual salary with a bonus keeping us more effectively leashed than the chained mace of an Inquisitor’s religious wrath.
It was in my ninth year at SolTech when I got an email from an old friend who found me through Facebook: June Guan, love of how many lives, a moth ablaze in the congealing flames of a frozen fire, my unforgiven sin, my brittle, broken soul. I was in love with her in high school. Did she have a precursor? She did, but… what the hell am I talking about? I barely spoke to her. I was just your typical high school nerd lusting after girls and wanting sex without knowing what it really was. She didn’t even realize I existed. In the four years I was in high school, she only said my name, Byron Zhou, once, because she was asking for help with her homework. We chatted a few times about the future during AP Lit, but that was it. I’d spoken more with our production assistant at work than I had the love of my youth. And yet, I knew everything about her: who she dated, how many members were in her family. Funny how stalkerish high school attraction could be.
So I was surprised when she suggested we meet up. I agreed heartily, scouring her profile to see if she was still single.
I met June at a fusion café, a trendy place with its combination of Asians and neon. She was comely rather than striking, serene rather than dynamic, a mix of Chinese and Dutch ancestors. She was nowhere near as pretty as I’d remembered her, with a plump attractiveness and a gaudy flowery dress that made me embarrassed about my childhood infatuation.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi!” she said, waving her hand enthusiastically. “How are you?”
“I’m great. You?”
“I’m great too. I love this restaurant. I absolutely recommend their spaghetti sushi broccoli hamburger.”
“I was actually eyeing the pesto chow mein sashimi.”
“Ehhh,” she said, shaking her hand. “It’s all right.”
I ordered it nevertheless. She picked a sake martini.
“Do you remember in high school you read books all the time?” she asked. “You talked about aliens and black holes and the Loch Ness?”
“Vaguely.”
“Do you believe in UFOs?”
“You mean like unidentified flying objects?” I asked. She nodded. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Why?”
“I was recently abducted by one.”
I burst into laughter, especially since she had such a somber look on her face.
“You don’t believe me?” she asked.
“Are you being serious?”
She lifted the side of her neck to reveal a nasty scar.
“The aliens did this to me,” she answered.
“The aliens?”
“I woke up one night and I felt this really bright orange light. It was creepy how orange it was because it wasn’t orange like an orange, but this eerie radioactive orange that seemed like it was from a different world.”
“Okay.”
“It was actually healing me. I just found out I had cervical cancer, but after the light, it was completely healed,” she said. “The doctors couldn’t believe it.”
“Your cancer was gone?”
“Yep. When the aliens returned a couple months later, I wanted to thank them. But it got really weird.”
“What do you mean?”
“There were shadows in the windows and I couldn’t see any of them but they seemed huge and they were shining their lights everywhere. And then I was in their craft or something, because I couldn’t control where I went, but I was moving. My mind went blank and when I woke up, I was in an Alaskan forest.” She took out a used airplane ticket stub. “See, it says Alaska. That’s proof that it happened.” I checked and the ticket did read Alaska to LAX.
“Do you remember what happened when you were abducted?” I asked.
“No, but I had scars all along my stomach. I’ve been doing research and I read how they like to grow fetuses inside a womb and cut it out. I was gone five days and I don’t remember a thing. I know it’s crazy. No one believes me, but it really happened…”
When the food arrived, she picked the spaghetti up with her bare hands, dropped it because it was hot, swirled it into her mouth straight off the table.
“It’s okay to use your fork,” I said.
“I know, I know, but I had a friend from Mongolia who told me you lose your connection with food that way.” She picked up her broccoli, swallowed the whole piece, and chewed loudly. Her mouth was covered in sauce as she asked, “How come you’re not eating?”