scruta

It’s that person you think you know, the one who makes you feel comfortable. But then a remark, a casual gesture or a sudden glance that becomes a deep penetrating sling-shot into your eyes reveals the distance between you.

And like that, you know you’re dealing with an utter stranger.

I hailed a cab, Shanghai, thinking I knew you, when suddenly you stared me right in the face. You stared me right in the face with your concrete slabs, your rotting porticoes and your dolled up waif women looking at me on the street corners with fear and a hidden disgust. You spoke to me in words that suddenly seemed more distant than I knew before, their syllables garbled in a way you knew I couldn’t understand. You pointed at me with your neon lights, raising shadows all around me. The cab driver asked me where to go and I was speechless.

I didn’t know you, Shanghai. I didn’t know you at all.

I will be asked why I stay here, and I will say it’s a secret. It’s a secret locked inside a silver talisman that never leaves my beating chest.

I will share it with no one, I say.

But there’s a deeper secret: the locket is locked, has always been locked and I do not have the key.

Learning Chinese in Shanghai:

A shopkeeper insists on using English

To sell me Chinese books.

Shanghai was an orchard of great trees bearing great fruit, reaching high into the clouds. I walked along the groves for miles, unable to find an end. I made my home in a place where the grovesmen of the orchard made their homes. One grovesman, old and kindly in face, let me live in the storeyard where he gathered fruit. Each night I slept with the sour smell of ripening fruit in my nostrils. Each day the grovesman showed me how to choose the rotten ones from the others, and soon, I became an adept laborer.

One day, while sorting out the rotten fruit, I saw a woman gathering my refuse which I had placed outside the storeyard. I asked her what she was doing, and she said that she was collecting them for her self and that she didn’t mind the rotten ones. Her teeth shone with a strange brightness. Her eyes pierced me strangely. She filled me with suspicion. So I followed her when she left with her basket of rotten fruit.

I arrived at a massive warehouse fashioned from the hollowed trunk of a great tree that had fallen. Following her inside, I saw hundreds of laborers all polishing rotten fruit, making it gleam, readying it for sale, loading it up on trucks to take it far away from the grove. I was shocked. I found her and asked her why she did what she did.

She said it was what she had to do. Everyone else was doing so.

“And the old man?” I said.

“Him? You are living with an old fool, a man who lost his family long ago. He keeps the good fruit for himself.”

I studied her face, reassured with a pride I couldn’t penetrate. She added with her flashing teeth, “That fruit won’t last forever.”

“Why not?”

“Because the trees are dying.”

I was taken aback and full of confusion. She sighed with disdain, then took my hand. She led me in silence out of the warehouse to the nearest tree, stretching high towards the sky. She hit it with her fist and it rung with an eerie hollow. As it reverberated, I could feel my heart falling.

Shanghai as a blossom on a withered cherry tree brought suddenly back to life on a spring day when the sun shines on a cavalcade of armed men, making their way to the Eastern Sea, lost in the thoughts of their homes, the warm beds and soft bosoms of the women, praying secretly that the rising tides across the seas will not fall upon their shores, carrying torture and mayhem and atrocities only forgotten in the passing of time, slipping away from us so quickly, like a cherry bloom, bright, full and then fading into oblivion, gone and gone.

Shanghai0820: squatting in a dark alley at 11pm, looking at my iPhone, thinking about being anywhere but here

Shanghai, I read you like a palm. I walk your streets
seeing how far they go, stretching beyond me like the years ahead,
driving me forward. I dig at your pavements, testing the surfaces,
knowing the rougher they are, the stronger they are. I pursue every
spur, every junction, every cracking access road, holding them
close to myself like wives and concubines. I look at the pallor of
the concrete rising around me, finding in those shades of gray
meanings that pull me closer, deeper towards the swirling lines and
the veins of life pulsing beneath them.

I was dead, Shanghai. My heart had stopped beating and the world was retreating into gray. All the things that I loved swerved through my head as my brain came to rest. They were converging, growing lighter, as I hung onto those last vestiges of myself. Soon I would be nothing.

But you, Shanghai, wielded a mighty defibrillator. When I thought that nothing was left to me, you shocked me back to life. You with your winding pathways and towers of power! You with your haughty homebodies and woozy wayfarers! You with your never-ending expectancy and unrepentant gaudiness! You with your energy flying through the streets at dawn, wailing low, calling the dead to life!

And you saved me, Shanghai. You saved me.

Shanghai caught me.

It caught all of us.

It caught all of us who wanted to change into something else, spread their wings and fly far, far away.

(I go to sleep at night hoping that I might again be released and not end up tacked together under glass, watched occasionally by a great magnified eye.

I wake up hopeful. My wings are still strong, and this net is full of holes…)

I was a mouse, a measly little rodent making my way through the world. My tail had been caught in a mousetrap and I dragged it around in fear, knowing that my only means of escape would be to sever a part of myself. Otherwise someone would come destroy me.

I dragged myself around and noticed I wasn’t alone. Hundreds of mice surrounded me, also trapped by their tails in mouse traps. We tried to free each other to no avail.

A farmer came trundling along and we all cowered in fear, but he paid us no mind. As he walked away, we saw that he had sprouted a tail and it too was caught in an immense mousetrap.

I weaseled my way into my mouse-hole as far as I could and fell asleep thinking about who had planted all of these mousetraps and when he would come collect us.