scruta

A waif of a girl, she was walking in the road, letting her heels click upon the asphalt, completely avoiding the sidewalk. She did it not because she wished to prove anything about herself. Nor did she do it because she wanted to save time. For her it was simply the way that one walked, inches from death at all times.

Taxicabs whizzed by at a clip, most of them only flashing their lights to acknowledge her presence, if they did that at all. Electric bicycles announced their arrival with a high, piercing ring. Trash trucks hustled past, groaning as they swerved around her.

She gnawed nonchalantly on a processed bread bun as she walked through an intersection, oblivious of the traffic lights, walking straight through the middle. I stood there waiting for the light, wondering what possessed her and where she was going. I tried to follow her across the road, but the cars were coming too fast and I didn’t have the intuition to navigate them. I’d lost her.

A minutes later I found her again, standing at a corner for a moment as she threw the wrapper of her bun at a trash can. It didn’t make it in, but she was unconcerned. The trash can was the token of a world that she participated in only as an afterthought. She was already off the sidewalk, shuffling down the middle of the street.

Shanghai was a blueprint that I unraveled on an endless table.

As I scanned the surface, the renderings began to warp and bend, suddenly destroying one building with the presence of another. Some areas changed so quickly they seemed to be black holes, maelstroms pulling the surrounding schematics into their tightening whorls.

The labels of many sections coalesced into a strange patois – not Chinese, not English, but something else, pointing to a semantic region boiling with activity.

I spent days poring over the blueprint, trying to reconstruct in my mind a city that I knew could not be constructed. For as soon as I had an idea of it in my mind, I found it had already changed in the blueprint.

I comforted myself in what seemed a futile task with the consolation that maybe, for a moment, as I had the idea in my mind and looked again, I had envisioned a piece of Shanghai.

Shanghai was a bourgeois couple walking down the street. Their clothes were oh-so fashionable: Bright colors jumped out from the stitching that held together their coats, dark like the light in a coalmine. Their hair was cropped in strange angles, coming to a point like daggers assaulting passersby. Their canvas shoes were cheap, ironically-so, but still they were spotless, as if they had been bought just hours before. His were gray with yellow laces; hers white with orange. They walked arm in arm leering into the shops and eateries of the city with a distant interest, like a sated junkie just begining to contemplate her next fix.

They beckoned me to follow them, and I walked with them in silence. As we traversed through dark, narrow lanes where the canopies of the trees grew together, I couldn’t see the neon lights from the skyscrapers in the distance. I felt nervous walking with them – both of them beautiful and stylish. I was their third wheel, an accessory that would steady them in the face of some desire or psychic crisis. I asked no questions. I did it willingly; I was so intrigued by their radience.

We pushed through the creaky door of an old lanehouse and made our way up to the third floor, passing by an old crone hunched over a gas-stove. She gave me a look of caution and surprise. I returned her gaze with a blank expression.

When I entered their flat, I was amazed by the squallor. Everything was falling apart. The windows were caked in dust, obscuring the outside.  A great mold had taken over part of one wall, turning it black. A mound of trash was piled in the corner, wrappings and stickers and tags and take-out containers full of rancid food. The only thing well-kept in the den was a tremendous, ancient wardrobe in faded red lacquer. Its doors were wide open and the garments inside radiated with a rainbow of color. The two of them looked at me as I took in the spectacle.

When I turned to face them, their faces, smooth and angelic scruntched into smiles. Their lips parted to reveal the stumps of black rotting teeth.

When I first came to Shanghai I was curious, and I asked its greatest sages to tell me the nature of Shanghai:

The first whispered  Shanghai is soft, malleable like the clays of the earth dredged up in springtime by blushing virgin women molding vessels for a great celebration.

The second spoke that Shanghai is hard, impenetrable, unassailable, a diamond so hard the lasers falter in its radiance, diverted into paths unknown, throwing the surest of men in their calculations to chance, to error and possible ruin.

The third railed Shanghai is a man, building himself from scratch, turning away the errors of the past, striving upward with an unassailable determination, reaching for the sky with hands that could grow fingers for fingers, nails for nails from the very thought of possibility, waiting for that moment to dig into a jugular and slake a thirst for power.

The fourth laughed that Shanghai is a woman, petty and longing for the capability of a man, searching for a mate to feed its desire, born in the streets of destitute greatness, the kind that longs for an order it knows it cannot have, but desires all the same.

The fifth said that Shanghai was fire, the kind that burned away all the viewpoints of old, to birth them better in a new light of day, miles beyond the haze of the rising sun, where the sun rays speak of new eras yet to coalesce in the shining.

The sixth said that Shanghai was flooding, ebbing, flowing, churning, rushing water, taking its toll, moving wherever it likes, held by the desire of gravity that says down, down and down. To follow it is a foolish errand, lashing oneself to a barrel only to know that it will topple over a waterfall deep towards its doom, where it might be eaten in the depths and recycled in the shallows.

The seventh said that Shanghai was death. He spoke little, and let the placid look on his face do the speaking.

The last spoke that Shanghai was life. His face contorted strangely and he laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed…

The heat of mid-summer was stifling, and I journeyed to the woods looking for comfort. I was sitting by a fresh, mountain stream when I saw it. The cub was exhausted, dragging itself slowly towards the other side of the stream, panting with thirst. It was so tired that it didn’t notice me, or find me threatening. It suddenly slumped over, as if to pass out. I wasn’t sure whether it would make it to the stream or not, and I wanted to help it.

Thinking twice, I stayed where I was. You just don’t get involved in the affairs of a bear cub. You just don’t.

The mother is always around, and she is unforgiving.

The lid is attached just so to the slot at the top of the SWFC, holding the entire thing in place. Condensation collects in the dome of the sky and drops down suddenly in torrents, only to evaporate again. The process repeats and repeats ad infinitum.

I like to think that we are all grains of white rice flailing around in it – growing larger, more saturated and clumping together. We are full, gushing with starchy energy, burning quickly for whoever could find a use for us. We accommodate all flavors.

We’re happy this way. Although we know well how we’ve been bleached, made uniform, stripped of our husks and the hearty way we once faced the world.

[Ferret and Bu-Ran-Don are walking through a lackluster exhibit on bugs at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. They watch a video of a beetle being eaten alive by a swarm of ants, and as it becomes more gruesome they walk away. Bu-Ran-Don continues to mill around, but Ferret spaces out by a fake stone column, thinking about the sudden severity of life and death. He is standing very still. A Chinese Girl sees him and meets his gaze. She studies him strangely, and he continues to look back at her, but gets bored and suddenly shifts his gaze. The Chinese Girl jumps back:]

Chinese Girl

哦, 吓死我啦!

Oh, you scared me to death!

[Ferret smiles, and the Chinese Girl walks away. Ferret walks over to Bu-Ran-Don laughing to himself.]

Ferret

Bu-Ran-Don.

Bu-Ran-Don

Yeah?

Ferret

I think a girl just thought I was part of the museum.

Bu-Ran-Don

Haha, awesome. Wait ’till we get to the part about evolution. Then we’ll really be able to mess with people.

All day long Shanghai made me think of a drunken poet, reeling his bearded-head around, shaking it in the breeze, as if he knows something that I don’t. The white, wild tangles of his hair seem to say so.

It’s nighttime, and he has just finished engaging in a night of drinking and feasting at an outdoor pavilion by a lake. All around him there are half-eaten dishes of food and empty bottles of beer and baijiu. There’s a pit of embers burning off to the side where there had been a barbecue. Small wooden stakes are sticking out of the ground nearby, monuments to the festivities.

I don’t know where his companions have gone, or why they left him there to contemplate the lake in the moonlight.

I greet him in English, finding it somehow appropriate, “Hello.”

He just shakes his head again, the same way he did before, smiling as he does so.

“What are you doing here?”

He shakes his head again.

“Are you composing poetry?”

Another shake.

I know I’m looking at Shanghai, but I’m compelled to ask, “Will you tell me who you are?”

And another.

I grow frustrated, and sit down next to him at the table, contemplating the mess: crab shells full of ashes and cigarette butts, fish bones piled like offerings to a lowly god of the nearby lake, gobs of pork bellies swimming in seas of purple, coagulating goo, tiny pieces of diced garlic that had once sat in a sea of green vegetables…

I notice that he’s now looking at me, watching me survey the mess. I ask him again, this time almost pleading with him, “Who are you?”

He shakes again, but this time points with his hands, out towards the lake then back across toward the table, as if that gesture itself could relate all that he is – a move from the lake and the forest beyond in the moonlight, full of promise, pristine and untouched to the glaring fluorescent lights just above us and the junkyard of scraps that lay below.

[Ferret and Glasseye are outside of Logo talking.]

Ferret

I think it’s weird.

Glasseye

What’s weird?

Ferret

I think it’s weird that in Shanghainese people always speak English to me.

Glasseye

What do you mean?

Ferret

I mean. If you came to America, people wouldn’t go out of their way to try and speak Chinese to you. They’d just say, “You’re in America, so speak English.”

Glasseye

Yeah. No, I understand. But that’s the thing about Chinese people. You know S&M?

Ferret

Yeah.

Glasseye

We’re the M.

Ferret

Haha. Okay.

Glasseye

No, seriously.

Ferret

I believe you, but it’s weird. I don’t see why they think it has to be that way. Chinese isn’t impossible for us foreigners to learn, and I bet you’d be surprised how quickly we’d pick it up if we were forced to learn it.

Glasseye

所以我们在说中文吧 .

So let’s speak Chinese then.

Ferret

[startled a bit, then realizing what was said]

好的, 我们说中文.

Okay, let’s speak Chinese.

[There’s an awkward pause. Suddenly nobody has anything to say.]

Glasseye

You’re right though. It’s still weird.

Ferret

Yeah, it is.

I dreamed that Shanghai was a simpleton

Who ate glass bottles,

And picked the shards out

From his teeth with a rusty coathanger.

+++

Though many said he would die

From hemorrhaging or tetanus

Coughing his last breaths

In pools of blood and vomit,

He came into his own all too well.

+++

His breath full of fire,

He spat diamonds.

And when he spoke,

The people listened.