A Last Night in Changchun

This story contains off-color language and some crudeness.

Someone is yelling at me. A hand twists into my down winter coat at the shoulder, pulling my whole body askew and slightly off balance. I look over and see an old man, face contorted in plosive admonishment. Words fall out in a tin-pot canter, too fast for me to understand. My Chinese is not good. Dangerous. Idiot. Look forward.

I look up to see the white BYD freighter trundling down the road and leaving black effusions in its wake. Its driver is still leaning into the horn, wailing a litany of abuse back to me. I need no translation. Had I really almost walked into that? I step back onto the curb and let the frantic commute continue. Other drivers join the BYD in a dissonant choir of anger. I raise my hands in supplication to the many-faced god of traffic.

The old man is still yelling. One hand is twisted into my coat, while his other is raised. It is merely a stump, a gnarled mass that seems to melt back into itself like heated plastic. I recognize this as a particular mark of the older order of local derelicts, the result of some calamity. The man has forgotten its absence, as he holds the stump skyward and makes phantom gesticulations to land his point.

There is a break in the traffic, and I step away slightly. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Thank you. When his hand does not loosen, I gently disengage it. I gesture across the road to convey my purpose and step out. The man is still yelling as I turn my back to him. I try not to slip as I alight the opposite curb.

I light a cigarette and look up at the Changchun winter. Intermittent smokestacks pierce the low skyline and breathe coal into the atmosphere. November had caked a generous layer of ice over everything, brought from winds born in Russia and abandoned to the south. There is a strange beauty to the place, honest in its depression.

I arrive at my building, a squat cement block of brutalist architecture. It is adjacent to the university campus where I work, where they file all their foreign staff. The door is heavy and of a solid metal frame. It slams behind me of its own accord and the sound reverberates up the hallowed cement steps. I reach the fifth floor and enter my apartment.

I walk in without wiping my feet, bringing in the melting slick from the street with me. There was a time when I took great pride in the cleanliness of my home. My coffee table sits before the couch in my living room. Soiled dishes litter its surface in a schist of glazeware that resemble ancient masonry. If it wasn’t winter, it would be crawling with vermin. I catch a glimpse of myself on a mirror hanging on the wall. I resemble my apartment.

I walk into my office. On my way, I am careful to skirt the pile of boxes that are stacked in neat contradiction to the surrounding discord. I try not to look at the contents. DVDs, notepads. An electric piano lay to the side of a box full of feminine hygiene. Dresses folded on top. I betray myself and stop to gaze at the contents. Something clicks in my chest and I feel my face contort. The episode turns some fundamental mechanism. I make a decision.

In my office I start up the computer, absently stubbing out my cigarette on the polished wood of the desk. Tickets. A plain, a train. All we need is an automobile and John Candy. I smile to myself and cough. A weight lifts from my chest as I make my purchase and begin printing the tickets. Beijing to LAX. Two days and I’ll be gone from the midden I have conjured for myself.

The purchase made, I take inventory of my needs. I’m not hungry. I’m not sleepy. Well, what do I want? A drink. I need a drink. Shit, the bars aren’t open. I light another cigarette and wait for the light to die as I watch the sky through the large-paned window that dominates the room. Night comes. I begin to pull on my oversized winter coat. A shout catches my attention, and I look down across the street.

Outside, on the road where I was almost flattened, two college boys are fighting. Well, the word fight is relative. There is a thin one and a fat one. The thin youth throws a few punches that hit the big boy like dumb flies against a sack of flower. Even from here I can see the evil smile of the other. Somehow, I know that whatever preceded this, he began with malignant joy. He grabs the thin one by the arm and slams him to the ground, a wet rag in the jaws of a street dog.

The big boy is on top of him, leaning his chubby face close to his victim, all twisted up with impotent rage. I see the bigger boy’s mouth move soundlessly from my window. He is saying something, some taunt in the turgid folds of his lips. Close, intimate – almost a kiss.

He lets up. Like a rabbit loosed from its cage, the thin youth heels it down the street at full tilt. My heart thumps with his own burning humiliation as he rounds a corner. The chubby student laughs, and the steam rising from his through remind me of the furnaces that pierce the skyline. Slowly the fat boy follows, rounding the same building and cutting out of sight.

I shake my head and hope those weren’t my students. I turn to go, but another movement grabs my eye. There is a cellophane bag floating down the street. It is larger than necessary and black; characteristic of the convenience store carry-outs apportioned customers here. It is a common thing to see them swept up in the wind like this, and they serve the landscape much as I imagine the tumbleweeds did the Wild West.

It is palpitating heart in the movements of the wind, staining the ground about it in variations of rippling shadow. As it reaches the corner the boys disappeared behind, something appears to leak from the cramped pool of tar underneath. Two distinct oil-streak lengths, shadows without an author, appear to grope outward and drag it in the direction of the boys.

For an instant it evokes some legless animal, wearing the camouflage of the night and dragging itself on the trail of prey. In a jerking, clawing motion, it presses to the ground and follows the course the two boys made. This image is fleeting, and in a moment, it is around the corner in defiance of the wind. I stare.

There is no validating such sights when you are alone. The brain is wonderous in its capacity to rationalize. A misfired synapses or some phantom psychology hiding in the jungle of the mind. The revered empiricism of the senses is a plaything to such hiccups.

I yawn, scratch my crotch, and decide I need more sleep.

But first, a drink.

I have no friends here, but there is a bar I know, and people there who know me. We keep each other company while we drink, ships at sea tethered for safety on foreign shores. The Three Monkeys, its called. Though the name evokes our host country, its guts are purely Western. The perennial “Irish Bar” where the city’s young foreigners meet to fight and fuck.

I enter and scan faces. I recognize one, a tall Scotsman named James. I saddle up to him and after a few perfunctory greetings, we fall into our patterns of discussion. Time passes and we drink and shoot the shit. We aren’t close, but as the beers flow we are the best of friends.

The clock's arms make their revolutions and I have almost forgotten about the boxes in my apartment when I see their owner enter. Foam drips stupidly out of my mouth as she takes off her jacket and stamps the snow from her feet. Her blond hair is radiant, falling in cadmium strands over the shoulders of a tight fitting black dress, the one I always liked. Behind her the new beau enters.

I stare as they float by in dedicated conversation, not noticing me. I panic for normalcy and spill my drink as I turn to James in attempt to carry on the revelry. He knows the story. I told him once a few weeks ago. He suggests we go to another bar, and I wave my hand, dedicated to a brave face. Magnetically my gaze continuously draws to them. Our booth. The one in the corner, with the large mirror over the upholstered banquettes.

I can’t help but stare. The place is more crowded now, and amongst the noise I can’t hear what they are saying. Their lips move silently amongst the din and some acrid thing from the back of my mind swims forth to fill the words. A half-remembered conversation only a few weeks ago.

Well, alright, I booked it. I’ve never actually seen the Great Wall.

I’m glad you finally agreed. You never go anywhere. Hey.

Yeah?

Do you mind if I invite a coworker?

A coworker?

Yeah, he’s this new guy, out from Colorado. He doesn’t know anyone.

I mean, sure, I guess.

Great! You’ll like him. He’s a lot like you, I think you guys will get along.

Rage blooms. I stand up, slipping in my knees. James grabs at my shoulder but I shrug him off. I make my way to the booth and present myself before them. Her eyes widen slightly, but otherwise she remains commendably inscrutable. The other looks ready, like he expected this. After a moment’s hesitation he smiles and puts out his hand.

The gesture is placating, congenial, and decidedly vulgar. With the nobility consigned a drunkard, I part my legs, a shootist at high noon, and let loose. A lifetime of creative epithets issue forth in a tatoo of indignities. A strange pride overtakes me in the sticklebrick labor of my inventions. Surely there is a prize somewhere for insults well shot.

She is less impressed. Her face shifts to anger, certainly, but then to something sadder and an approximation of pity. In the midst of my diatribe a get a look at myself in the mirror. At some point in the night, I had put the hood up on my winter jacket, making my head appear bulbous and giving me proportions of a large, furious baby.

I realize how stupid I look, and this understanding causes me to drop my words and stare confusedly, like a cattle hearing jazz for the first time. This pause in recognition seems to settle something for the beau.

He is not that much bigger than myself, nor particularly stronger, but his fist connects true against my jaw and I lose my balance from the house of cards where I believed my legs to be. He’s a lot like you, the floor chides as it rushes toward me.

They have left the table long before I reclaim myself. James peels me from the soiled boards. Another round and a moment to regain my composer. We don’t talk, just drink with purpose. Eventually, we wander into the freezing night. A new drift of snow has powdered the city, fresh and white.

I don’t know what time it is, but the roads are dead under flickering sodium lights. Among the silent buildings we ford our way like winter mice in a graveyard. Below tenement headstones we stumble towards the vague destination of another bar.

I lament. Give a litany of plans waylaid by failure. Hopes of marriage and self-worth shot with humiliation. He plays the role of conciliator, offering insights broad enough to hold unfocused wisdom.

The streetlamps herd the shadows to a black river in the center of the road. We skirt its shores. Winter gusts blow a storm of trash that intersperse with the falling snow, purity mixing with filth in a poetry of motion. I tell James I’m leaving.

After a quiet moment, he speaks again. I hear him clearer than before.

Hey mate, I wish you the best, I really do. But I don’t know if that’s the right move.

I look back through the snow and see my footsteps. They appear foreign to me, less like the remnants of my path than something stalking me.

Only way to get over a woman is to get into another one, yeah?

James lights a cigarette, its red glow flaring purposefully as he takes in a drag. He exhales a thick pillar.

Speaking honest, you moving won’t change the fact your bird’s with some other cunt.

For some reason I keep looking back. My eyes follow the fading trail of my footsteps behind and stop. Squatting on their path between the ponds of lamplight is a crumpled black mass that does not move in the wind.

Plenty of women here, yeah?

Oily black skin shimmers under the sodium lights and between the latticed reflection I can see it is a plastic bag like all the rest.

You leave now, I think it will stay with yeah, fuck with your head.

I hear him but I am still looking at the thing down the road. It punctures the snow in its negation of light and appear to spread, tendrils reaching out along my tracks.

What I’m saying is you should – shit!

The thing disappears in an effusion of light. The night is banished before a rapid yellow sun sunrise, the glacial road turned the color of gold. The face of God accompanied by a thunderous canticle.

A hand twists into the shoulder of my overstuffed coat, and I’m yanked into a pile of snow to my right as a car just misses me. Headlights flood the empty road as the driver blares his horn and sticks out his arm, honoring my Western heritage by giving me the finger.

Christ man, that shit's dangerous.

I look at my shoulder. James is standing over me, a panicked smile spreading across his face. He laughs and shakes his head.

Almost got hit. You gotta keep your eyes forward.

I hadn’t noticed that a light snow had begun to fall. I wipe myself off and stand up. I look at James to offer a slurred but heartfelt thanks but stop. His face is different. Its familiar, but I can’t place it.