The old man was in bed. The sun was just starting to come down, and the room was getting colder. I got in bed too, despite the hour, stared at a book, and watched the words wiggle and dance around on the pages while I reviewed tape. Chinese characters floated in the rain. A Chinatown that never ends. None of the cheap plastic is talking, and even if they were, they’re shape-shifters, amorphous, capable of any design, any lie. The whole city’s a lie. On the edge of a jungle in constant springtime, high up on a mountain, a silvery shot down towards the river to the border of Indochina, the opium highways dotted with cheap neon and cheaper noodles for both jittery and numbed of brain. I’m capable of wandering forever, like I was born wherever I am, like I don’t know where I’m going, but keep going, guided by some glimmering light.
Trapped in a labyrinth of streets mapped on principles of commerce and repetition, a faith in outcome, a numbers game that gets tighter and tighter the more people are at play. What do they plan to do with all of us? Life as sewing machines, sex dolls, and seed beds for future slaves. The chances looking up or down, calling it luck, do whatever you can to win. The machine moves forward. There’s nothing stopping it now. The distant rumble breaks the center of the Earth, smelting pools forming and congealing into every imaginable form. A new beginning, a history erased. Faded to memories of a lost tradition, an ancient poem, a lost and faded sea of silk lining the steps in a pyramid of spirit stones raising onward to the peak of magnificence drawing the final line. The earthquake’s jaws open the land and its fiery mouth, the dragon now emerging covered by the burning rot of the city, the polluted rivers of slime dripping over reptilian eyes, toxic spools of chemical smoke rising from the nostrils of a gargantuan demon unleashed upon the Earth. Deeper in the Earth lies the headless idol of Shiva, as many arms as the sins of men, in corporation to rule and destroy, this wheel of fire burning in sun and rain.
City lights and flashing colors light up ubiquitous screens. World markets crash, yuans rain from the sky. The lights explode and riding past, a little girl sits on her father’s lap and drives a motorbike for the first time. Pop! Pop! Pop! Fireworks burst somewhere on the mountains. A couple gets married. The cries of a baby. A schoolgirl sits and cries. I’m sitting in a McDonald’s when I feel it. I’ve been here before. Not just a McDonald’s, but this same exact one, and this same exact song, playing softly above us from the greasy atmosphere. Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky. . . The same girls decorating the same Christmas tree the same way, laughing as they place stars as if for the first time, at the same time it starts to snow.
I woke up; the room was dark. The old man sat alone by the bed getting drunk. What would I do if he offered me a sip with those sad, bleary eyes? In came Nemesis, turning on all the lights and fiddling around noisily, zipping his zippers back and forth, scratching like a DJ, searching his pockets for something he never finds, an object worthy of muttered profanities, which I noticed come out in English, but still I refused to connect. All of this exertion apparently made him thirsty. He squeezed his water bottle with a crunching sound of plastic, wringing it over his tongue like he was in the middle of the desert. This inspired him to take out his laptop and bang away at the keys like a monkey, running at the pace of a speed-typing contest, stopping only now and then to sniff his bananas, making sure they didn’t ripen on him without his permission. Any minute now, he would peel them. I merely had to wait. He picked up the whole bunch, stuck it to his face, and inhaled like some potassium junkie. “I should bust him right now for vagrancy,” I thought. “Right, old man?” The old man looked at me with his bleary eyes and smiled.
The next morning, my sunglasses vanished. “I can’t let them see my eyes,” I thought. “Where could I have left them?” Suddenly it hit me. Nemesis! That banana-sniffing coyote stole my frames, set me up, and sprinkled glass on the crime scene. I could see it all perfectly. While I was in the bathroom, he pawed my Ray-bans to place at the site of a future double-suicide. How Machiavellian of you, Jack.
I came into the room roaring his name: “NEMESIS!” but found the old man sitting alone, drunk again before noon. “Where is he, old man? Talk!”
I gave the room a good thrashing.
“WHERE ARE THEY?”
I sniffed the sheets like a bloodhound searching for the scent of citrus to lead me on the trail. Whirling around now, breathing heavily, I pulled out my dental floss and advanced on the old man. He jabbered something in Mandarin and held up his hands as if to show me he was innocent. Finally I gave in to his drunken smile and took a shot of baiju. Now he had me.
Hours later, emerging from the dorm, a woman at the desk stopped me. “Someone left this for you,” she spoke in monotone. “From your room. Leave yesterday.”
“Nemesis left those for me? Are you sure? Did he have a bunch of bananas with him?”
She nodded in the affirmative.
“Well, I’ll be.”
I pocketed my sunglasses and walked down the street into the setting sun. I see a tree forever trapped in autumn. I see windows on night buses and water drops of rain. Far in the distance, in dreams where you see green, a fire.