3:31AM: We hold hands after we finish and she says, “Promise you won’t hate me.”
“For what?”
Her forehead is covered with sweat.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I t-t-t…” She lowers her head, gets up and runs for the bathroom.
“Are you okay?”
“No!” she shrieks. “Shit shit shit!”
“Sara—”
“Bring me a pillow, now!”
I grab a pillow from her sofa, hand it to her. She’s naked, arms clutching both walls. “Wait outside.”
“But—”
She’s quaking, she screams, her veins throb. A small protrusion forms near her vagina and splits open. There’s something poking through, and blood covers the surface of the object. She grits her teeth, screams. Goo builds up and there’s a viscous mess. An egg drops on the pillow. She stumbles, takes a deep breath, picks up the egg (which is about three times the size of a normal one), and washes it off in the sink.
She walks past me to the kitchen. Takes out a frying pan. Cracks open the egg. It has a light red yolk, and she warms it up. Two minutes later, she sits down at the table. “Have some.”
“Umm…”
She gives me a fork. “EAT!” she commands.
I take a bite, am stunned. She asks if I need salt or Tabasco. I shake my head.
“This is the best egg I’ve ever had.”
4:19AM: Once we finish, she says, “If you’re not here in the morning, I understand.”
“Is it every time?”
She nods. “One of my ancestors burned down five henhouses and killed over twenty thousand chickens during the Opium Wars. The farmer who owned the land cursed him, and all the women in our family have laid eggs since.”
“Is that a true story?”
“Not sure,” she replies, walks to her bed and passes out.
I go to the kitchen and clean up, throw away the egg shells. Look through the hundreds of books she has on foreign languages.
9:22AM: Next morning, she wakes up.
“You’re still here,” she says, surprised.
I hand her the marker she used for tagging. Put out my palm.
“Mark it,” I say.
Forbidden City Hoops
We went out at daybreak, as soon as we could see. We hustled through the shopping menagerie of Wangfujing, through the barren plains of Tiananmen, into the crimson maze of the Forbidden City, to a hidden corner where the guards had set up a basketball hoop to shoot a few during their breaks.
I was afraid of getting caught but Alice, my girlfriend, assured me that no soldiers came out this early — too afraid of the phantoms and spirits of ancient court officials.
Chinese with dark hazel eyes, she was the stubborn dilettante who enjoyed the chaotic stringency of Beijing, looting its bazaar of experiences and bartering with street merchants for old teeth and dragon horns. She was like a defiant Chinese hornpipe, her melodies clashing with the pipes next to her, the sound changing timbres faster than a tuk-tuk racing down the streets of Chang’An. There was nothing she liked better than her own private basketball court. With her own private rules.
“These rules are stupid,” she’d complained when I began to teach her the refinements.
“Rules are rules.”
“Why can’t we change them?”
“Because that’s the way they are.”
“Emperors and empresses could change the rules anytime they wanted.”
“You want to be the new empress of basketball, be my guest,” I said.
“Okay, how about we play with the rule, you can’t get within a foot of me, and anytime you do, I automatically get an extra point.”
“What kind of rule is that?”
“A good one.”
The next day, the rule was, “If you hit the rim, it counts as a point.”Then there was the day she permitted wrestling, so whenever I went for a shot, she’d tackle me, grab the ball, and put it in for a layup. Last week, she declared, “It’s opposite-point day.” Whenever I scored, she’d get the point. Whenever she scored, she tallied it for herself.
“Is that fair?” I asked.
“Who said anything about fair? You forget where we are?”
Never. The palace of the Ming and Qing emperors towered majestically; the symmetry and planning, coordinated to a brick. Grandeur was the theme and bright red, its coat of armor. The site was so massive, it was a marathon just to find the bathroom, marching past the serpentine cypress trees and the statues of turtle gods.
I marveled at the idea that once long ago, I wouldn’t have been allowed to enter. Now, tourists swarmed the palace, snapping photos. The original name was Ziji Cheng, or Purple Forbidden City, the purple referring to the north star, which was the heavenly abode for the Celestial Emperor. Even though he was considered the most powerful of the gods, he wasn’t responsible for the creation of the world. In fact, the Chinese are the only major civilization without a creation myth. It was as though they’ve always been in existence.
Much like Alice. I couldn’t imagine my life before her.
A production assistant from Shanghai, she had quirky eyes that seemed incapable of stillness. I was a photographer from the States, discontent with the brittle tapestry of loneliness and its withering ramifications. Forced beauty had been my addiction, evaporating when I realized I wanted something more than the veneer and sham of digitized desire. It was fleeing a shoot for Calvin Klein one afternoon that I had discovered our basketball court.
I fell in love with Beijing’s eccentricities the moment I landed, the lavish landscape of skyscrapers intermingling casually with the ancient hutongs and decrepit apartments. It all seemed like part of the canvas of a brilliant beatnik engineer suffering delusions of petulance, never satisfied, always proud. Flaws weren’t pariah here; foibles were badges of character, not something to be brushed away in Photoshop.
I started dating Alice when I asked a group of models during a shoot for good food recommendations. No one answered except for the lone production assistant carrying coffee for the talent.
“Beijing has the best food in the world,” she declared.
Then she went out of her way to prove it, bombarding me with dishes like braised beef and rabbit tail grilled to impeccability. There were feasts of frog cheeks and deer brain served with the famous kaoya, Peking Duck, wrapped in duck sauce and cucumbers, simmering yellow wine to accompany the mung bean soup and the curry salted crab. I ate whatever she threw at me and she appreciated my boldness by accepting every date I asked her for.
After our eighth date, I asked if I could come by her place.
“Sorry, can’t do that,” she replied.
“Why not?”
“I have twelve cats and they get really jealous.”
“I can handle jealousy.”
“Not when they’re scratching your face and peeing all over your clothes. How about we go over to your place instead?”
I laughed, wondering how serious she was. “Sure.”
My living room is generously proportioned, but television sets occupy every square inch: huge dreadnaughts, small kitchen units, old antiquated relics, brand-new flat screens.
“I’ve never seen so many TVs in a room,” she said.
“I collect them from the dump, and I make sure every screen plays a different channel.”
“Why?”
“I love the music of discordance,” I answered, then flipped on all the TVs with the master control.
“Wow,” she said. “It’s kind of romantic in a weird way.”
I kissed her. She twitched, but kissed me back. We stood in each other’s arms, basking in the histrionic rays of television tubes that synchronized to the blend of comedy, drama, and infomercials.