“Every night until I’ve completed one.”
“How many so far?”
“I have no idea,” she replied. “But you name the person, and they’re up there.” Pointing to one, “He’s an epileptic taxi driver with cerebral palsy. That’s an actor who only plays hermaphrodites. Delivery boy of divorce notices post-life, artist that paints through smell, a French pastry chef that makes odorless cuisines, a journalist who only writes obituaries for pigeons.”
“What happens if they refuse to come?”
“No one’s ever refused, though some come back more than once and I have to turn them away.”
Further along the wall, I saw women of different sized-breasts, varying splotches of pubic hair, soft cheeks, tough cheeks.
“Women too?” I asked.
“Feminine whimsy is usually more inspiring than masculine yearning.”
I felt dizzy, like a million eyes were watching me, lonely, vicious, avaricious, flowing into the ravine of essence, a disparate orchestra clashing within. It was like all of China was staring at me and suddenly I remembered the moment I decided to leave the States. Three years ago, I was running around a swimming pool. There was an especially wet area and I slipped, hitting my head on the concrete. The concussion knocked me out, and when I woke, I could no longer see through my right eye. Everything had become left-centric, a spherical partition sundering my vision in half. The world was incomplete, corruptibly contemptible. The job I’d fought so hard to get felt empty, and all my ambitions seemed juvenile — climbing the flaccid vines of opportunity while vying for attention from superiors who’d rather flirt with coordinators than listen to my concerns. And for what? Stress and a couple extra bucks that were like sucking popsicles in the Arctic. I realized the love of my life was a shell, a woman who wanted me to love her reflection and hated me when I saw through to the sutured seams of her bare body. I felt lost in a tundra of futility that found enthusiasm more daunting than climbing the thousand-story pavilions of Chinese myth. I knew my so-called ‘stability’ was a wooden igloo I’d been clinging to because I had no alternatives. My blindness had exposed my blindness and though my sight gradually returned, I couldn’t ignore all the things I saw. Vague, hazy splotches called to me, and one rancorously depressing morning, I found myself buying a one-way e-ticket for Beijing.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
I told her everything. Concluded by saying, “You love my fingers, but I hate your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Because they found me when I wanted to be lost.”
I suddenly grabbed one of the mannequins and smashed it into the ground. Seized a broken limb and hammered the others, pounding them to pieces. My wrath effused through my arms and legs. I was no longer human; instead, rage personified, the primordial savagery of instinctual chaos funneled into my fists. When I was done, there were a trail of mannequin corpses, murdered without mercy.
Breathing hard, repletely depleted, she gripped me by the arm. I instinctively pushed her away and part of her shirt tore, revealing a nasty scar that ripped across her shoulder. It startled me. She quickly covered it. Then led me to a room to cast my hand in clay. We didn’t speak for thirty minutes. After the clay had solidified, she led me out to the front door.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“I wanted something so badly, I tried to destroy it when I couldn’t have it.” She clutched her shoulder, a trace of pain whisking by her eyes.
“Will I see you again?” I wanted to know.
She slammed the door shut.
I stumbled outside in a daze. Couldn’t see anything. I bumped into a car, nearly crashed into several boxes. My ears died, my nose became clogged, my tongue paralyzed. I could feel the cartography of my bitterness etched into the mountain ranges of envy, see all my life clear as a film flash and how crudely incomplete it was. I was the Buddha of no parts. And the sea that hid me had vanished like my anonymity.
Passing Glance
It wasn’t the lanky cigarette or the weathered black heels on the stranger that reminded me of Sue Lian. It was the wispy puffs of hair curling down her ear, her fleshy lips fading into an insouciant sheath of pink. Millions passed through the Beijing subways every day and I only saw this woman for a glance between stops. But that was enough to remind me of Sue Lian’s torrid touch, her withering sarcasms, her caustic glower that sundered titanium into granules.
I was a granule when I met first met the love of my life, unconsolidated, uncommitted, unsophisticated. After her, I was a granule cut in half, tossed about by market vendors, boiling with sweet potatoes and rice cakes. Everyone in the subway had an intricate recipe for their complexion: a squat woman yelling prices for magazines from her column in the subway; a young dilettante reading four books in four different languages while wearing his purple hair like a hat; three poets chewing greedily on pastries and commiserating over the misery of joy and the bliss of sorrow. I put my bag through security check, the debris from my debilitated soul hidden from their scanners. The subway routes were labyrinthine and the Mandarin directions, difficult to decipher. If you weren’t going anywhere, it was impossible to get lost. But even though I had no destination, I felt tentacles clawing through my pupils, a spider web the size of Beijing spindled together by the arachnids of industry and imagination.
My imagination died the day Sue Lian was struck with motion blindness. The savage histrionics of winter wind in Beijing blew a loose piece of construction straight into her head, knocking her unconscious. When she woke up, anything that moved refused to register in her visual cortex. Friends and family became phantoms, and the love of her life was the invisible man viewed in disparate frames. She couldn’t see me in motion and our desires became frozen in the strata of memory, carbonic fossils stuck between the Triassic and Jurassic. Walking together was a march to confusion, dance was a gyration of madness, sex became an aberration of the senses. She just wanted to stand still, me by her side.
I couldn’t, even without direction. I stumbled sideways, sprinted backwards; I swam through polluted ether and imbibed bitter gasoline. Kinetics had sabotaged my serenity and my heels kept on flipping askew. Sue Lian dealt with it by closing her eyes and re-experiencing Beijing through smelclass="underline" the pores of sweat, the unsanitary sanitation of public toilets and charcoaled skewers roasting mutton and pork fat. She sucked on the fumes of the ubiquitous cabs and ignored the fireworks of vermilion pillars piercing the air. Buildings blinked at their veins, silver skyscrapers raced with dull gray apartments blemished by a familiarity that led to apathy. I saw a hundred talk bubbles above the invisible comic panels for our graphic novel of love, her bartering aggressively with a twelve-year old girl for a fake Gucci bag, the insistence on imitating every animal noise she heard. She ate a million snacks between midnight and 3 a.m., and we attempted to exterminate moths resting still in our closet while laughing at the futility of utility in affection. I loved her dumbly and she loved me with a keen intelligence that could have taught a tortoise how to dance on top of a flea.
It was my obstinacy that led to the sight I hated above all, the weak crinkling and the struggle against expression in her plaintive eyes as she realized she was no longer loved by the man she loved. Her illness made her too strange, a chasm cauterized into the hutong between us. In the days that followed, I drifted through the city. I felt like I was back at Tiantan Park watching the specter of a woman: elegant, turquoise dress, dancing beautifully by herself, hovering from one prospective partner to another, trying to find someone to accompany her but finding herself alone. All of the comforts of Beijing seemed alien without Sue Lian.