It was a pristine morning. The harbor and the docks opened themselves into the ripening bouquet of autumn—when the colors swayed and vibrated between reds, yellows, oranges, greens, and browns. The caffeine smell of early morning issued from the silent hull of the ship while harbor waves treaded delicately. Passengers shuffled onboard and took their seats: the Nantucket Fast Ferry was guaranteed to arrive in Hyannis Port within two hours.
Some minutes passed, and the doors of the ferry closed. Everyone was inside, sitting calmly in the rows of nylon. Next to the front row window sat a man. He was complaining about something, and in the reflection of the window his withered hands trembled, subdued by the cold iron voice of his once bewitching bride, who sat next to him—a sweet looking woman in her early eighties, wearing a pale gray sweater and chic blue foulard. She had on dazzling pearl earrings.
She began to shout as she stood up and Why don’t you quit whining! made the room swell with bitter feeling and Jesus, just STOP it already! words that pounded against his wilted ears. She walked off.
The solitary profile of his once handsome face was barely visible from behind the tall ferry seats, but the hands—they stood out in the light against the tinted windowpane. Slowly, they worked at the muffin and tried to make the pieces drag themselves up to his mouth. They were hands that betrayed themselves—now scraggy and pale but clearly once muscular and commanding. The thin glass veins struggled to lift the wrapping from the baked treat that was his breakfast. It seemed that somewhere behind the back of the chair, a mind was pulsating intense decrees to make even the most basic movements possible. Deliberately, the pieces began to disappear. The ferry pushed off from shore; it would be only two hours until it reached Hyannis, and no more.
His wife came back and, bending over him, forced a coffee into his hand. As it spilled out he gasped and cursed her Well good JOB! in his own emaciated way. Furious, she ripped the cup out of his hand and You can take care of yourself, all right! threw it into the trash bin. What should have been a moment of sympathy—an old shell of what had once been a tall rugged man now unable to even hold his own coffee—deteriorated quickly into GET UP, it isn’t a big DEAL! something pitiful as he looked up at her and with a crack in his voice begged her Please don’t, you’re embarrassing me… for just one moment of understanding, of unconditional love.
Where were his children? They had probably dropped the two of them off at the ferry and fallen back into their own circuit, their own youthful life filled with its own host of first-world problems and just enough good health never to really notice how good it all was. But the circuit would again come round, and in twenty or thirty or some number of years they too would be dropped off on some ferry by their own children and face the cold unforgiving Atlantic, alone.
That was the way of Nantucket—of countless other islands that catered to the wealthy—where fathers’ houses were bought by children at good rates and then updated and redone in ways that were fashionable and modern. The parents then became strangers in their own homes, no longer movers and shakers but now pushed aside to make room for fast-paced dinner parties. Gradually, the children began making more and more money and the parents stopped earning anything, relying on the image of what used to be—the oh-so-important appearances of manifold wealth and importance. Draped over their threadbare bodies rested expensive suits of impeccable cloth—articles from a bygone era when they triumphantly swarmed upon the islands and felt like they were somebody.
Unsure of what else to do, his hands—sufficiently greased from the ferry-bought breakfast—began to search for something to clean themselves with. They looked this way and that, one finger haphazardly prodding the blue blazer lapel before deciding not to further sully the wardrobe. The jacket was as traditional as they come: navy with gold buttons, probably bought at Brooks Brothers some ten years earlier. It hung loose, with pockets of fabric sagging across the shoulders of his frame.
Unable to bear this slow, unproductive effort, his wife shoved some napkins his way. After several seconds, his hands grasped the old crumpled paper, now brown and worn with the refuse of the blueberry muffin. He worked diligently, as if the one thing he had left, the one quantum of control that he still possessed, was his ability to keep his hands clean and civilized.
Finished with their work, they fell back into place at his sides, gone from the light of the windowpane. The ferry continued onward: the engines humming, steady, consistent.
It’s strange being told the reason for some bodily phenomenon by someone from another culture. The advice always comes in the same cookie-cutter, old-wives-tale, assured-because-my-mother-told-me-so fashion: you need to drink hot water, or you’ll get sick; you need to wear more clothes, or you’ll get a cold; you need to see a traditional Chinese doctor—Western medicine is overrated; you have to drink tea to stay healthy; it is better to eat medicinal foods than to take medicine in pill form; you should always take a walk after a meal; don’t eat in restaurants—it’s unhealthy; don’t drink coca-cola or other beverages—you should only drink water; never drink anything cold, especially not with ice; ice? in a drink? are you crazy? you’ll get sick and die!
The universal Chinese cure for everything—ranging from the common cold to a broken leg to a divorce—is to 多喝点水！ (duo he dian shui), or, in English: drink more water! It is the anthem to which each Chinese soul steps in unison, a billion three-hundred million people sharing this common cultural value. No, the Chinese do not all concur about the virtues of Communism or the glory of Mao Zedong; instead, the only thing they can all agree on is this one infallible principle, by which one merely ought to drink plenty of hot water. If you can follow this sagely advice, all ailments will leave your body faster than a foreigner can figure out how to spell and correctly pronounce ‘Genghis Khan.’
While I do understand that drinking a lot of water is very healthy and that Coca-Cola is unhealthy, I fail to understand this predominant concern with the temperature of things. In the classroom, it can be 70 degrees inside but if it’s cold outside, my students will all continue wearing their heavy winter coats for the duration of class. When, in the heat of a lecture, I decide to discard a sweater, opting to downsize to a single layer, I am greeted with the gasps and shocked, pallid faces of concerned Chinese youth. It’s as if they’ve already begun to grieve about the sealed fate of their pitifully misinformed foreign teacher—chronic illness and a certain, early death.
I can only guess that this phenomenon arises from the fact that the majority of Chinese people are either raised by or in close proximity to their grandparents. From a young age, the people of the People’s Republic are indoctrinated with the primordial fears that the elderly have of things like the cold (after all, the gray-haired members of the human project lose body heat at a rate far higher than adults or children do), handed down from grandparent to grandchild for millennia. It makes sense, therefore, that my young students were baffled at the fact that I would wittingly remove a layer during the winter season.
We just have a different understanding of the word. The winter, for me, is a season dictated by whether I am outside or inside. If I am inside a heated room, it ceases to be winter there in that moment. The idea of winter still pervades my senses, and I am much more likely to consider drinking eggnog. But as far as the physiological side of my body is concerned, I follow the ambient temperature, not a psychological idea of what the temperature should be. But for the Chinese student, it doesn’t matter how hot the room is—the notion of winter has cemented itself firmly around the student’s frame of consciousness. Refusing to let go, the cold takes on a demonic persona: it tempts one to get comfortable, to be tricked into disobeying old grandma back in the village. Yes, the cold is all in your head, there’s really nothing to it…go ahead, relax, take off your coat and stay a while it seems to whisper. Ever the misguided foreigner, I am easy prey for these daemons of the arctic.
But these Chinese values have gradually become instilled in my daily habits. After just a year and a half, I now only drink hot water; I try to wear a sweater inside until I get so hot I can’t bear it anymore; and I drink as much green tea as possible. This shift was a conscious one at first, where I would say to myself ha! look at you, drinking hot water! who do you think you are, Lawrence of China? But then, gradually, it became a part of my repertoire—something that went unnoticed and became so indispensable to my everyday life that to ignore the advice of my students was to fall prey to some East Asian ice-god’s malediction.
Now, when I get sick, I inevitably come to the conclusion that my body’s cosmic balance is off somehow—that if only I hadn’t gone outside wearing just one layer under my jacket—if only I hadn’t opted to drink coffee instead of green tea the day before—if only I hadn’t lazily decided to drink that cup of water it in its lukewarm, anemic state: then all of my maladies would be gone, left back in America where people are fat and overmedicated and addicted to Coca-Cola and ice in their drinks.
As it turns out, these students were here to teach me something. Grandmothers of China, I salute you!
Things were fast, unusual, cold. Everything felt heavy; it was dark.
He turned around the corner and saw the cars moving their red tail lights swaying behind them in their turns down a long wide avenue that stretched out into a vast plain. The line of automobiles swept past him, a rushing sound like wind.
In the brief space between seconds he noticed that all the cars were moving in one direction—like everything had a course and a purpose—and then in that instant he knew that things were good and beautiful, that the end was not the end but rather a path that led toward another beginning that in turn would weave its way forward and into eternity—that very longed-for place where heaven would greet him with a light most divine and pure, most spoken-of and longed-for by so many—by everyone, secretly. He exhaled.
But now the vision was gone, vanished with the brilliant red lights and the endless pale horizon. He reached out from behind the darkness and grasped after the retreating colors and the sounds. He found himself turning a corner.
Suddenly, he was lying on his back in the familiar hospital bed with the small buttons to press and the steel rail to drape his leg over. But he was not in the hospital, no, he was in an even more familiar place: it was his bedroom, the one he’d slept in as a child before they had moved to Jersey so his father could work at IBM. The colors on the walls were clean against the outlines of the Superman and Batman posters, and he smiled. In the foreground stood his mother; she was young, like in the photos, and smiling that same smile with her dark ebullient eyes. She looked beautiful, his mother.
Yet something frightened him because she was so still; she became rigid and mechanical. She was just an image, a giant cut-out of an old photograph—the very same one that was in the foyer of the New York City apartment he’d rented in the 70’s.
It disappeared and in her place was just the brightly painted wall. To the left of the bed stood John and Steve, and he knew exactly where he was. This was where he’d been right before everything had started to move so fast, right before he’d started to die.
“We’ll see you there soon, old friend,” John had said.
“I’ve heard there is no pain, that everything floats off in a wash of color and light,” Steve had said.
And then it all came back to him: how he had been brave and not minded the dying part; how he’d lived a good long life and was prepared to face the ‘next,’ whatever it would be.
The scene blurred back into darkness, and in that moment he felt an excruciating tremor of loneliness. He ran. Sprinting away from the scene, the last moments he could remember, he tried to fight his way back to the normal world where things made sense. You spend your whole life trying to make sense of things and when you finally start to feel at ease with it all it’s taken away from you. It wasn’t fair it wasn’t fair it isn’t fair let me out! he shrieked into the air, colder now than before, like those alpine lakes he’d visited in Montana, the way they would stab you a thousand times and take the air out of your lungs.
Smothered by the cold, he pushed the wave off himself and continued to run. But there was no burning feeling in his legs—they worked tirelessly in an attempt to rush him back into the world that he knew—that spherical object with a molten core, with gravity and respiration and exhaustion, with streets that ran in both directions and led somewhere that didn’t vanish.
They said your life flashes in front of your eyes. But this was not life; this was something else.
There, receding before him—it was his desire to live! He wanted to shout, to call it back, but couldn’t; he pressed with all his might against the ground and shot forward across the maze of street corners with their dark alleyways shifting themselves into a blur until he found himself suddenly in a tide of pedestrians intermixed with carts and rickshaws; behind it all stood the Saigon cathedral. It had been forty years since he had been there, and yet it was so vivid he was right there and could smell the motor oil and hear the rumble of the small engines as they floated by—their expressions determined—to work—to rest—but above all else to live—to live!
Now everything began to evaporate around him as his legs gave up their pounding and slowly he began to feel relaxed. Shadows filtered down across the horizon like a curtain in water, swaying almost lovingly across the sky and falling over his thoughts. He closed his eyes and fell backward.
Suddenly, he felt an urge to look once more at those scenes from his past—to experience one last time the beauty of his now receding life. His eyes burst open, and he searched the horizon for some sign. Above him, hanging in the sky, was projected the image of his childhood friend’s dog, the chihuahua that would visit his family’s house from time to time looking for a treat. The dog, Stella, was grinning a big wide-toothed grin and wearing aviator sunglasses. Smoking a cigar, Stella winked at him; then it all, everything, began to melt into the knowledge that this was his last waking moment and with that—this, his last realization ever—he shuddered as he tried to
We stood alongside the towering green-furred pines as the snow came down in small but plentiful white dots that scampered across our overcoats. We had paused to talk, to hash out our ideas about what was true in the universe. We had also stopped to see how educated we each were, to show that our university tuitions and the names of our respective institutions had paid off, had given us the ability to argue quickly and well.
Moments earlier the three of us had walked up the steep bank that was slowly turning white, was gradually becoming covered with a soft crunchy curtain that made a beautiful delicate sound as the thousands of individual beads formed a compacted whole underneath our heavy, insulated Gore-Tex boots. We hadn’t planned for snow but luckily we were prepared for it.
The conversation had ambled along with us, starting out with the usual mundane topics as we unloaded our food and Brandy into the Kazakh Yurt and prepared to make our way through the rolling grassland and up to the beautiful picturesque mountain that I had visited the previous Spring. The fog was hovering close to us then and it was impossible to see very far but we had come a long way by car and had planned the trip in advance and we were damn well going to hike in the beautiful draping layer of gray and white. We were young and hoping for the best, for a view of the mountains further up the trail.
* * *
An hour earlier, as we prepared to leave for our hike, I had needed to go back inside for water; my newly arrived Princeton in Asia cohorts waited for me as I re-submerged myself into the warm darkness of the Yurt—a gigantic white tent used by nomadic peoples—questioning whether we should in fact go hiking in such poor visibility. Then I rejoined them, the conversation.
We began walking up the road as delicate pieces of hail started to fall. It was not uncomfortable hail but rather it was dispersed and spread apart. It moved gently across the mossy green of the grassland, rolling across the hills and jumping playfully along the frozen gravel under our feet.
We continued along the road, talking about newly discovered mutual friends; sharing stories of past conquests borne from parties we’d been to; and quoting lines from the token American movies. The three of us had each chosen to spend the year in China’s far northwest, in a province that borders Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan, to name a few—clearly we would have some things in common. As we made our way up the slowly increasing slope, we started to feel more comfortable around each other—speaking a similar language borne from upper-middle class America and elite undergraduate institutions.
It was the first time the three of us had gone anywhere together, and while the car ride had been pleasant, we were finally here in nature, without our cell phones, or girlfriends (or possible flings), and we really, truly, liked each other.
* * *
The road forked to the right, but I decided that we should turn to the left and walk up the hill in that direction. I had been here once before, in the early Spring the previous year, and I had followed the road all the way up to the rightmost peak, which I couldn’t see now. It would be better, I decided, to get off the road and head toward the left-most peak that I hadn’t yet climbed. I was looking for a new experience.
“Are you sure we should go that way?” Chris asked.
I assured him that we wouldn’t get lost, that I had been here before, and that while it seemed very vast, the area we were walking in was in fact not so big and rather difficult to get lost in. So we made our way up toward the left slope and Robert got out his compass and took a bearing. This was a good idea, and neither Chris nor I had thought to take the precaution.
We couldn’t see very far at all now, but uphill was uphill, and so we knew we were heading in the right direction. Our progress was slowly halted every few minutes as we made our way up one slope only to realize that the white fog was leading our minds further up than the physical limits of the white hill actually allowed. The illusion was always the same: look up and see a big tall hill that continued up for hundreds of meters; climb up to the top; realize that the whiteness of the surrounding air was blending perfectly with the cresting white hill, and that instead of continuing upwards toward some sort of mountainous peak, it only led downward into another small micro-valley with another descent followed shortly thereafter by another deceptively small scoop of land leading up into more vacant space.
* * *
Slowly, the hills lost their green character and became wedded to the curtain that pressed low and soft above and around us. We were enveloped by the hills and so we put our trust in our footsteps’ ability to lead us in a straight line toward the mountain, which we knew was looming above us somewhere.
Finally, after being pushed and pulled up and then down in our attempts to ascend, we saw the first shadows of three big pine trees making their shapes known in the relative distance. They stood like dark sentinels, announcing the presence of a new microclimate, a new terrain.
The ground quickly became rocky and the snow started coming down in a pure thick fluff. The air was sharp now and we paused to rest underneath the awning of that first tree. We sat on the soft russet pine needles and I drank water, afraid of dehydration and altitude sickness, something that had plagued me in the past. I offered Chris and Robert some water but they politely declined. After taking a determined sip of the ice-cold liquid, I tried again to encourage them to drink, tried to make them understand the dangers of dehydration and exertion and altitude.
We sat for a moment and listened to the silent lapping of the snow against the foliage and the stones. It was like time had stopped moving, like nothing existed outside of what we could see with our limited vision. But our footprints from moments before were becoming less and less visible.
I was hot from all the walking, so I took off my down jacket and replaced it with a raincoat. The sweat felt uncomfortable, like it was trapped within my mid-layer and under-shirt. The heat was stifling and I began to regret my over-preparation, the way I had overburdened myself with layers that ended up serving no purpose.
With the jacket tucked away carefully in my daypack, we were now ready for the march; we continued, this time going unceasingly upwards, with no rolling hills to shackle us to the low horizon. We had finally found ourselves beyond the roller-coaster weaving grassland.
* * *
We turned toward the sound of water rushing cold against rock matter, invisible through the dense snow and low-lying fog. After a minute’s walk, we could see the rolling stream. Robert took another bearing, and we decided that it would be most prudent to make our ascent up along the river bank, to avoid getting lost. The snow was getting thicker now. Chris paused, looking off into the intangible distance, staring at the proximate nothing that we presumed was veiling the vast mountains of China’s Tianshan range.
It was cold. We walked up the river a few paces and somehow it was written that we happened to come across two gigantic skulls hanging from the base of another of those deep, imposing pines.
“Well that’s not creepy at all,” Chris offered upon finding the sinewy jaundiced remnants of a head. We couldn’t figure out what animal it was. At first I suggested cow, but then Chris adeptly pointed out that it probably belonged to (or used to, at least) a camel. Suddenly it was very obvious that it was in fact a camel, with its long beak-like snout and ridged teeth clearly advantaged for grazing on strands of roughage in the sparse desert grass. The teeth looked like razors and each of them had a dark hollowed out portion either from over-use or from infection.
We stood there transfixed by this reminder of death, this image that was present and real and not from some second-hand apocryphal story; death was ugly, sickening; it was horrifying but also amusing, because there were no camel dentists, apparently.
We continued on.
* * *
We slowly made progress up the side of the ravine, making sure not to get too close to the white edge. The snow became more and more thick under our feet and we slipped once or twice, each fall bolstering our determination to continue onward. Chris described a favorite website of his, XKCD, and one of the hilarious logical inconsistencies it had recently pointed out regarding the inane behavior of human beings.
“Oh yeah, didn’t you mention another article from that site yesterday?” I asked, groping for the story, feeling ashamed of my poor memory.
“Yeah, what was it…?” he too, couldn’t recall.
“Wasn’t it the one about the physicist who calculated that if there was such a thing as a true love, you would have to spend ten hours a day every day of your adult life looking for her to have any hope of finding her?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” he laughed.
Not content to let the opportunity shrink away from us, I continued, “Well that guy didn’t even take his analysis to the greatest extreme. Have either of you read Plato’s Symposium?”
Neither of them had.
“It contains a series of speeches on Love, and one of the speeches deals with the idea of True Love; specifically, how utterly improbable it is for one human being to ever find their True Love. The speech, delivered by the Athenian comic poet Aristophanes, makes use of a myth in which human beings, in their original state, were whole and perfect, never wanting or needing anything. They were both man and woman in one, and they never knew the idea of Eros, or desire, because their existence left nothing to be desired. In a similar fashion to the Old Testament’s story of the Tower of Babel, these early human beings grew too confident and their sense of supremacy angered the gods.
“To get revenge, the gods divided human beings into two—cleaving each soul from one harmonious whole into two wanting, needing halves. So Aristophanes claims that the root of Love—Eros—is the absence of something. Basically, we are constantly trying to re-attain that pure unadulterated form in which our souls were in perfect concord with everything. Therefore one’s True Love is that other half—the person whose soul used to be wed to ours. If we can find the other half, we will live in complete bliss, never wanting or lacking anything. But underneath Aristophanes’ entire argument is the notion that one’s True Love doesn’t necessarily need to belong to the same city, the same country, or even the same time period. What if your soul mate lived four hundred years ago? So ultimately it becomes almost impossible to ever find that one person who is your True, Perfect, Love.”
Chris and Robert listened politely, and they looked interested. I felt like I was contributing something to our walk.
“The idea that True Love could ever exist is the most illogical and ludicrous notion I’ve ever heard,” Chris said with stringent force.
“Is it?” I asked, caught off guard by his intense tone.
We stopped walking. The snow was falling with the same weight as it had been just moments earlier, but none of us seemed to notice or care; we didn’t move the few feet over to the cover provided by the stand of trees on our right. The three of us looked at each other, considering our own opinions. I personally had no real opinion of whether True Love was something I believed in or didn’t, but that the very notion should be ludicrous? I didn’t agree at all.
“This is a very common but very flawed notion that human beings have. We are animals that have evolved over time to have certain feelings that we like to cover up with saccharine idealism about our true calling, and the purity of our existence… but none of that is remotely real or verifiable. The majority of people would agree with you—that True Love is a tangible thing, that it exists—but if you look at it logically, it has no basis in the verifiable world, the world of science and observation.”
He spoke rapidly, the ideas hitting me like a cold wave. It scared me the way he could make an argument sound so cogent with such breathtaking speed. He accelerated, saying: “There is no soul, and there is no soul mate. No observable process in the universe lends itself to the idea that each individual, mating, human being has one match that is infinitely superior to any other. Animals have an innate desire to produce offspring, and in order to find a superior mate, we take the former necessities like strength and fitness and bedeck them with modern-day cosmopolitan attributes like a sense of humor or intelligence. We’re still relying on that same wavelength that the rhinoceros relies on, but we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that just because we can build computers and write books about the world that we are somehow separate, on a different plane from its dirt-riddled reality.
“Your soul mate isn’t living in some village in South America three hundred years ago. Your ideal lover needs to have a series of common experiences that you and she can both relate to. People don’t transcend society and culture unless they make a conscious effort to do it. To believe that there was some woman out there speaking a forgotten language three hundred years ago who was capable of making you utterly happy—it’s absurd. Go to New York City: you’ve got a much better chance of finding her there than you do scouring the entire history of human beings.”
He paused for a moment, then began again: “You want to believe in this idea of ‘perfect,’ but there is no ‘perfect,’ there is no one thing that is ‘most suited’ to you. You have lots of people that could make you equally happy. How on earth are you going to measure one person’s love as being the best?”
I tried to quickly consider everything he had said before I responded. But I felt rushed.
“What do you mean you can’t measure it? The idea is that there is one person whose every aspect is suited perfectly with yours. If you’re a utilitarian person your soul mate will be equally as utilitarian, getting the exact same use out of you as you are getting out of her. There are so many different types of people in existence, there has to be one person of all the people ever with whom you are most finely tuned. The natural world is filled with ‘most’ and ‘least.’ If you can say, for example, that water is at its highest temperature at x degree and its lowest temperature at x degree, why can’t you have one person that is most suited for you and one person that is least suited for you?” I was getting in over my head. I was feeling cold and my hair was getting wet. I felt the strands, and they were becoming icicles. I wanted to say, ‘aren’t you guys cold?’ but I remembered another work of Plato and laughed to myself that the body could so completely obstruct such an abstruse intellectual conversation. I refrained—tried to pretend that the cold and the wet weren’t bothering me.
“What does that even mean, ‘most suited to you?’ What you’re talking about is something completely abstract that has no bearing or relation to the natural, quantifiable world. You’re mixing your metaphors and trying to use something absolute, like ‘Hitler was a man,’ and saying that that statement is just the same type of quantifiable statement as ‘Hitler was a terrible man.’ You can never say absolutely that Hitler was a terrible man because it is a completely subjective claim. I could just as easily say that for me, the things Hitler did weren’t bad at all and then there’s no categorical rejoinder you can make.” It was exciting to breathe this air and exhale and watch his eyes as he quickly transitioned from one line of direct questioning to another.
“I think you both are saying interesting things, and overall I definitely agree with you, Chris, but you could measure things like Beta-waves, for example, to show tangibly how two people were perfectly suited for each other,” Robert came in to my aid and I felt grateful that I didn’t just have to rely on my own incredibly limited, dim view of ‘science’ to make my point come across.
“Again, what is this word perfect? And what if you run that test and then you have a couple who claim that they are completely in love and perfectly happy with one another but you have to say, ‘nope, excuse me, you’re actually not perfect for each other?’”
“Then they wouldn’t be perfect for each other, they would just have found someone very close to it,” I interjected.
“That is incredibly unspecific. There is no such thing as a Kantian Ethics and there is no such thing as a ‘perfect tuning of soul—’ these are just constructs of people who are afraid to face the world as it is, who need something more than just what we are—living, breathing, imperfect beings—to feel like life is a magical thing.
“The world is spectacular—it’s incredible—it’s magnificent—but there doesn’t need to be a God or a perfect harmonious union of souls for that to be the case.”
I looked at the ground, feeling that he was missing something beautiful about human life, something so intangible and vague that nobody could ever prove or disprove its existence. But at the same time I felt that what I was missing was something worse: something real. Suddenly, just the notion that True Love was important seemed silly, the idea that it should exist in relation to any of the laws of the universe a ridiculous farce. I felt ashamed for having taken eight political philosophy courses and then losing an argument to a graduate of Social Studies at Harvard who was soon going to enter the Ph. D. program in Political Science at the very same institution with that unbearably elite name, and here I was: the self-presumed intellectual who was thinking of pursuing Literature and Philosophy and feeling empty, like none of it was worth it. We walked on, and for a few dejected minutes I was unable to make steady eye contact with Chris.
* * *
The snowfall began to mount across the coniferous giants as we continued up the ridge and crossed the icy remnants of the river. Chris slipped and banged his leg up but managed not to get very wet at all. I was worried about him and suddenly the embarrassment from before was gone and he was not an intellectual assailant anymore, had again taken on the form of the super agreeable new guy with a great sense of humor.
He was not the complaining type and so we continued on without issue, finally moving beyond the looming masses of trees and finding a steep hill with a set of crags peaking out over the top. We climbed up to see what view there was on the other side, now talking about time and whether it was subjective or objective. Chris claimed that it was objective and Robert that it was subjective, that an hour in meditation could feel like no time at all and Chris responding that after an hour of meditation the clock still read that an hour had elapsed; probably missing the point, I claimed that time was in fact both, existing in a unique way for each life form, that within this uniqueness lay an absolute unyielding rule of which the individual experience was one particular form.
After ten minutes we had reached the top. But what should have been a pristine mountain view was just the beginning of a deep valley, with a disappointing thirty meters’ visibility. In the valley below were more trees, and they looked just the same as the trees in the valley we’d just come from. They were draped in snow—the thick white cobwebs of the early winter. The curtain hung across the valley and it became clear that there would be no view today.
We looked out and saw the wall of emptiness, a full cloud of non-visibility. Robert took some photos of the jagged granite, the only part of the peak that was not pure white, the only image that stood out against the starkly obscured hill.
* * *
We threw a few snowballs and watched them tumble down, picking up other small pieces of graceful flickering snow as they went, creating a tumbling of faint pieces of dust-like snow that drifted up in slow motion with each sliding bounce. Soon we too descended, sledding between steps in a controlled fall that was careless and young.
We started back down the same trail that we had ascended up, our uphill footprints dim in the growing quilt of soft snow. I wanted a change of scenery, wanted to walk through the forest that had embraced our right flank as we had made our way up the river one hour beforehand. Robert and Chris were skeptical about losing the way. I assured them that we wouldn’t.
Now the subject had shifted back to the less abstruse, and we talked—or joked, rather—about Google’s prominence and what their new Google Glass concept meant for 21st century interaction. We trudged through the drifts between the wooded, sheltered pine needles and described friends and friends of friends who were working on iPhone applications and of all the Harvard kids Chris had known who wanted to be the next Zuckerberg.
We arrived at the bottom of the forest and back to the foot of the grassland, this time too engrossed in contemporary affairs and pop culture to pay much attention to our footsteps or the direction they traveled in. We crossed a river or two and then thirty minutes to an hour had gone by and we were somewhere among the rolling hills that suddenly appeared as if they were leaping uncontrollably into one uniform, impossibly confusing mass. It was six o’clock and we had two hours left till nightfall—the time when the deep-set haze of white would grow into a dangerous, dark situation.
* * *
But I was confident that I knew the way back—if we would follow the river downhill, it would lead us to the main road and from there we just had to turn left and head up until the next road that went left and before too long we’d be back at the Yurt, warm and drinking brandy. We walked some more and Robert took another bearing, this time seeming more determined than the last. The situation was rapidly deteriorating and yet we three were together and not too worried because it was turning out to be quite a day, an adventure, a great story.
We continued our conversation, stopping every now and then to look at the odd exhibit of carrion strewn along the way. It seemed that with each step we plunged further and further into the fog; it became more and more thick and with the fading light went visibility and my left heel began to feel worn out but I ignored it and trudged onward thinking that everything would be all right. The cold was starting to feel more pronounced and I kept telling them that I recognized certain places and bends in the river but gradually I shut up because my statements were, as Robert rightly pointed out, a product of my own wishful thinking. I hadn’t actually been to this part of the vast grassland before. We were nowhere near where I thought we were; we were anywhere.
No path that we took seemed to be leading anywhere closer to our destination, and I wanted to start running along the riverbank while there was any light left, wanted to keep going down the stream, to plunge forward under the blind assumption that we would get lucky and find something. Robert warned against just following one direction continuously because it might just make us even more lost. It was seven o’clock and time was running out; we were at least an hour’s walk from the start of the alpine trees, where we had initially made a wrong turn.
* * *
We began back the way we came, this time with hurried, serious steps. Hills came and went slowly in and out of focus and my mind became worn with the idea that this day—this great story—might actually not end the way I’d always imagined it ending, that we might in fact have to spend the night in the rapidly dropping mercury or try to build an igloo, huddling together inside hoping that minor frostbite would be the least of our troubles.
Suddenly out of my peripheral I saw a small hovel with three jet-black horses standing outside. It was barely visible but it was really, truly there. We walked briskly toward the hut and called out as loud as we could. A dark figure emerged wearing a huge coat and a big fur hat, definitely Kazakh. We got closer and he smiled a big toothless smile, his face dark tan and wrinkled with years of hard work in the sun-steeped grassland. He spoke very little Chinese but we gestured to convey the fact that we were lost and he pointed behind his hut to another hill with a lone figure and some sheep, motioning for us to follow him.
He rode atop the smallest of his three horses, a pony really. His dark green coat and his legs hung over the side of the rotund, un-athletic animal. It was amazing the way the beast was able to carry even its own weight across the muddy snow-coated slopes. We reached the base of the hill, and a woman came down and greeted us, smiling warmth, her broad cheekbones welcoming and kind.
We explained our situation and she replied with a thick Kazakh accent that her father would show us the way back to our Yurt. Amazed, grateful, we shook her hand and followed the pony-clad Kazakh grandfather figure, our savior, out into the void. He led in front and didn’t say a word. He and the animal began to gradually escape into the distance, and we had to pick up our pace, joking about how silly it would be if we lost our way again. It was the most impossible scenario watching this hulking figure saunter out in front of us, the only visible sound being the slow pattering of hooves and the faint echoing of boots engaged in long, wearied strides.
Then he stopped. He turned around and waited for us to catch up. He pointed to some motorcycle tracks imprinted deep in the snow and gestured for us to follow them, saying ‘Yurt’ and pointing in their direction. I was very skeptical that this wasn’t just his apathy, but Chris and Robert reached out gratefully to shake his hand and I followed their lead, letting the warm powerful tanned baseball mitt of a hand envelope my cold glove.
* * *
We went forward into more of the same scenery and started up yet another hill when suddenly in the distance I saw a black dog with its teeth bared, standing directly in the motorcycle tracks and blocking our way forward. Quickly my mind jumped to the worst, and I grabbed Chris and Robert and halted them, pointing to the spot of our impending doom.
“Dude that’s a sign, not a dog,” Chris said in a reassuring voice. Robert concurred. I didn’t believe them—there it was, bearing its teeth all white and ridged, its hindquarters priming to burst forward.
We walked a few more paces, my tone turning to one of pleading caution, begging them to please be sure they weren’t making a mistake. I took my eyes off of the animal for a moment and a second later, when I looked back, it was a sign on two black metal legs with white writing clustered across its face. It had seemed so real…
We stopped to examine the sign, and Robert asked about a clarification of the Chinese characters printed across the metal frame. Chris clarified that it meant ‘deer bend.’ He then read the characters aloud in Chinese.
“Oh, that’s the name of this grassland,” I added. I’d known how to say it, but had never learned how it was written—one of the problems of studying a language like Chinese. “Guys, we really shouldn’t stop moving. This motorcycle track could be leading us nowhere,” I reminded them. They offered their assent.
By now it was no longer snowing, but the cold was biting in ways that flakes had been unable to. The worst part was the idea of the possibility of what might come.
But then out of nowhere emerged first one Yurt then a series of Yurts. They slowly unfolded in front of our eyes like the tree line had earlier that day, this too being a sign of something beautiful. Now, it had been a proper travail, an adventure we could talk about with our digits and limbs intact. We had triumphed, we had won.
* * *
We entered the compound and I felt like Odysseus realizing he had finally found his way back to Ithaca. We had big smiles on our faces as we told the affable part-Chinese, part-Kazakh owner of what had occurred. A jovial man with a hearty laugh, he chuckled at our errors in judgment and told us that he was glad we had finally come back. We would need some coal for the Yurt, and we were hungry. Chris and Robert went inside while I accompanied the owner to his own Yurt to look at the menu and see what food options we had. We had brought a miniature camping stove and plenty of instant noodles, but this was no time for cheap instant noodles.
Toward the tail end of our journey I had slowly begun to notice a headache, and now that we were safe it was coming on with vigor. Perhaps I had been so preoccupied with the task at hand that I just hadn’t noticed it; in reality my body was probably only now starting to feel the effects of the altitude.
I quickly looked over the menu with its predictably inflated prices and made the mistake of asking what his specialty was. Of course the most expensive option on the menu was the answer, but it was big enough for all three of us and we were starving because lunch had been a meager combination candy bars and cashew nuts and we’d been walking for hours since then. I left his Yurt and closed the scrap metal door behind me, the clanking sound bringing a new surge to the pounding in my head.
Once inside our Yurt it seemed like everything was cold and wet and I laid my clothes out to dry, hoping that the coal furnace would speed up the process. It took much longer than I had expected, however, and it seemed like forever before they were dry. The blood was pounding hard against the inside wall of my skull and I lost all of my appetite. I lay down and for the first time all day felt no desire to speak, to join them in their lively conversation. Just looking at the bottles of brandy on the table made me feel nauseous and the dim headlamp hanging from the ceiling was painful to make eye contact with.
I wanted so badly to regain my strength, to once again be a part of this new group that was exciting and stimulating to be around. I reclined back and laid the sleeping bag across my body, too weak to zip it up or properly climb inside. I could feel the cold pressing against parts of my exposed self, but pulling these parts in seemed like it would require too much effort and so I just lay there, having no energy to comprehend their voluble words but focusing instead on the dimness of the ceiling as I pondered when it was that the carpets and blankets had most recently been cleaned and how long it would be until the food that I didn’t even have an appetite for would come and when it would be that sleep would finally take me off into a place where my head didn’t hurt and the altitude was non-existent.
* * *
I fell into a daze, awake but unthinking, when finally the door opened and the overpriced food was brought in. I brought myself upward and tried a bite and then another of the chicken. The noodles came a few minutes later and those were easier to handle. I knew my body was hungry and that the chicken was actually prepared quite well but neither of those things registered as my mind decided for me that it was time to lie down again.
“How are you feeling?” Chris asked—an impossible question to answer because I knew it probably seemed like I was overreacting with the way I was laying there pathetically letting the chicken that I had ordered get cold in the empty cold space that drowned out the stove’s hot coals. For the first time a thought occurred to me that I didn’t necessarily have to stay there up on that plateau and suffer the whole night, that I could pay some ridiculous sum and have someone take me back to my apartment that rested at 500 meters above sea level, three hours away.
I ran the idea by Robert and Chris and it seemed farfetched but I was feeling so desperate I wanted more than anything to just get out of there and get back down close to sea-level, to find my warm apartment with the Advil and my girlfriend there to take care of me. I asked Robert to go and ask the owner if there was anyone nearby who would be willing to take me back.
Twenty minutes later a taxi arrived, had come from who knows where. He refused to take me all the way to Shihezi, but could take me as far as the closest city, at which point I could find another taxi to take me the forty minutes to my apartment. He wanted 300 RMB for a two-hour-long ride, which made me feel sick inside, and I tried to put up a fight and bargain him down to 150. There was no chance in hell that he would drive me for that little and he knew as well as I did that he was my only option and that I was too determined to get back home to care about such a steep price.
Robert and Chris helped me into the car and we said goodnight. I was freezing cold now but I entered the car and felt the fabric-smell and the blasting heat of the interior. The seat was uncomfortable but it had a seat belt and I wanted to leave as quickly as possible, to get down to a level that my body could handle. We lurched forward and the car bounced up and down across the stones in the makeshift road. Our forward progress, the fact that I would soon enough be out of this pressured hell, was enough to ease my headache to a tolerable level.
About twenty minutes into the ride I urged the driver to stop because I felt like I couldn’t hold the sickness in any longer. He stopped the car just in time and I threw open the door and stood up and immediately began to vomit for what felt like an hour, but was probably only a few minutes. The lactic acid smell was in my nose and my eyes were bulging with tears and my head felt like a summer day in the Gobi. We were still too high up—our progress was too slow—and the altitude was corrupting my body, its ability to self-regulate. I felt so powerless, so utterly incapable of living, of thinking and doing the things I so wanted to do. I had ventured a few hundred meters too high, and now everything had become bleak.
I spent a minute catching my breath and wiping away the vomit and the snot that clung to my face. I got back in the car, signaling the driver to continue. He didn’t ask me if I was all right, he just put the car into drive and continued on his way. I would get through this.
* * *
The rattling of the chassis didn’t bother me at all as we swept across the small ditches and corroded lines that characterized the mountainous road home. We built up speed, falling down, going back into the place with no ascents or altitude problems, a place I had lived for a whole year, a place with warmth and my girlfriend waiting for me with her sweet caressing eyes.
The fog gradually washed away—was brought to a tolerable level by the steep descending plummeting motion of the car. The lower the car went, the further you could see; gradually, city lights began to shine in the distance. My head hurt softly now. I slowly let myself fade out of consciousness, my head swaying back and forth in the enclosed cabin. I knew that I would be home soon, away from the fog and the hills of deceiving white, far removed from the mountains that Robert, Chris and I never quite fully grasped.
There was an uneven sound in the air, and it wavered across the room and into the foyer.
The foyer was mostly dark. Inside there was an antiquated radiator that stood next to a large chest—a blur of green lacquered mahogany heat. Through the depth in the shadows of the foyer were reflected the loud sounds of a September morning. It was as indifferent as any other September morning: it was that time of year when things were busy leaving, inevitably beginning their quarterly end.
Michael peered out between saturated lashes, looked across the grass and the pond and through the mist and noticed the emptiness.
Michael was between the two spaces. September was the month of Michael’s birth, and yesterday afternoon he had celebrated with his friends that were still local—those who hadn’t yet moved on like the flocks of white painted geese searching for the hot swamps of Florida or Alabama. The swamps of Florida and Alabama were quite populous this time of year.
The air filled the room unevenly; it disturbed something. Michael reached for his coffee.
The contrasts of the world, the inconsistencies of life, were most pronounced in the autumn, that time of his former undergraduate life when the good boys from down the road some ways would drive up in their trucks or SUVs, carrying their hopes and aspirations for the year (the closed-in amount of time where they’d be free); when a year’s time seemed insurmountable and it was always unfathomable that it should ever be brought to a close. They drank pints and threw cans hollering about southern traditions and the legends their daddies’d handed down in the dog-gone gone-by days of before.
Now Michael got up and put his orange juice away. He took one last sip before the glass swept across the iron sink, taking its place amongst the clutter of yesterday’s still unwashed dishes.
Some friends had come by for a small party. They mostly just talked about the times they’d shared back in college—that long-lost life, now only ten months past. Michael now trudged along the cement floor of this new life—his nights sharing a room with nobody out in the country, the crickets and the sounds of nature’s reflexive honking his only company. His best friends were scattered, cut up into chunks across the country and in some cases the world and they weren’t moving back anytime soon.
He sat calmly in the sun looking at the still morning light behind the deaf old willow that comprised his yard; one long thread of young green remained—the tree’s last signs of life—dipping into the stale murky pond below.
In many ways Michael was angry. He hated the ways things had insisted on being. He was tired of the old system; he didn’t consciously know it but he wanted more than anything for things to just quit, to cease and be simple like they once were. Not ten months had passed since graduation.
He packed the pipe and watched the smoke as it curled and danced up into the THC horizon; his vision became warm and fuzzy; soon he was smiling.
Michael sat back into his chair and closed his eyes, letting the bright shards of a new Sunday—of a new start—carry him off into the morning.
He awoke to his hunger later, in the early afternoon, as the sun was overhead and coming down over the house in clear, even draughts. He wiped his eyes and yawned. Getting up slowly, he checked his answering machine and listened to the cold silence. A gray cloud seemed to circle overhead. Michael packed the bowl again. It was a Sunday, and there would be many more like it.
Let’s go have a drink he said. But my stomach was upset and I was on time change and I didn’t care for a drink although this was Istanbul and the cafe was beautiful and oh, what the hell, a drink might calm my coming-from-nowhere anger that arose from every corner of every action that they, my parents, seemed to perform. A drink then.
Father let’s have a drink I said; and son what would you like—it’s your birthday! he responded; and I asked to have what anyone has on their birthday and so I had that, sipped it down. We ordered another.
And it was my birthday and so where would you like to go see today? they asked, and somewhere was the start of an answer; and of course the great, famous mosque was where we would go, so we finished our third drink and began to walk; it was a good city for walking.
I trampled the dead streets beneath my feet; this, my second time here in this spellbinding city, Istanbul. We were in Istanbul, and I had been here once before. But I suppose there’s nothing special about that, because Istanbul is so old and the concierge at our fancy hotel seemed like he’d seen me at least a thousand times over the three thousand years that this city had been headed toward being called Istanbul—seemed like he knew me and Istanbul better than I knew myself, because I myself was meant to enjoy my day of birth—was meant to get my maximal gain out of the whole damn thing. My parents had paid a lot of money for the airplane ticket, and this was their son, was their baby boy who was back from China, for now.
But I hadn’t been born on this day: I’d been born twenty-three years earlier, on a day that called itself today, and in that instant it seemed that this city—the place that had called itself Byzantium then Constantinople and now Istanbul—was waiting for me to arrive all along. So of course we would go to the mosque that was actually a museum because it was famous and it meant so much to so many it meant theworld was connected through a soul through god through channels of prayer and marble and taxis and expensive airplane tickets and cocktails.
We were drunk, wandering amidst the whirr of concrete and stone porticos, the kebab peddlers and ice cream stands, when suddenly that cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum came into view and look at the nuance in the marble she said; my mother was right and I hadn’t noticed it. But I didn’t care for the marble or the historical import it carried—probably it was the alcohol,the drug,the intoxicating liquid that had been promised by many to make me enjoy this day,my birthday. It was the day I was born on: two decades and two years plus one, now, ago.
Let’s go somewhere else I said, (did I say?) as the buzz began to fade we walked across the painted streets, smeared with the colors of old/new stone, mixed with the soft warm fleeting light of stale afternoons that inevitably ran away to some place where there were no mosques ; then we were on the sidewalk and the cars whipped around the corner moving fast look at the Bosporus somebody said; then we too were moving very fast and I could see beautiful women with dark eyes and even darker hair and soon everything was dark outside and it was time for a birthday dinner with wine, the shade of which white—hectic red—? didn’t matter because it was the feeling it gave you that mattered. But I couldn’t focus I was really drunk now I kept seeing her, that girl I loved here three years ago, and I was there then/now but I wanted to be there just now.
Let’s have a rest we said let’s get some sleeplet’ s twenty three,twenty-two+1:
words,numbers you grew up so fast they said I’m not grown yet I
said; my mother began to cry on the table;
Let’s go somewhere else the world said let’s go back I wished I had said:
‘to three summers ago,’ ‘three suns or moons ago,’
‘just a measure of time
ago.’
let’s go back ‘three measurements ago:’ ‘three lost loves ago;’ I wanted something to measure
It was a blur that reached out onto our restaurant table and wove itself into the napkins and our glasses of tea and water. It was very clear.
It was very clear that this blur that existed in the space between our sips of water and our vocal chords was what I had tasted on many occasions. I wondered if its opacity was mutually transparent.
I smiled. We’d been friends for the year, my year in China. We’d been friends for this, my first year in China—abroad—and we went to meals together once or twice a week. In typical Chinese fashion, we alternated between who treated whom to dinner. This time it was my treat. The last time it had been his.
We were friends for the extent of a year. A year was a long time. We knew each other well, and this was my treat.
I was not merely taking my friend out to eat spicy chicken with noodles (the chicken came on a big plate with flat white noodles); thestakes were higher: I was taking the possibility for interconnectedness between people from disparate cultures out to dinner as well.
I sat there awkwardly and consumed this heavy serving of clarity—that we had had so many dinners like this very one and that our meals had always come with a side order of the same, dull dinner-table conversations. And then I wanted to leave the table, wanted to escape the haze of in-between and its rich hoisin (hoisin? really? was it?) sauce. It was a dark brown; it was a bright red; it was spicy.
It was spicy and it stung my nose and confused me. It was dark and rich and beautiful indescribable and yet here it was, asking me to describe it.
The best I could do was to say that we weren’t friends—that our year together had been spent playing with our forks, gently pushing the food around our plates without really knowing what it was or why we continued eating it. We were posturing at being full.
And then it appeared that we had continued eating it because we believed that eventually the cultural issues would break away and we would find each other truly interesting. So I kept asking him to lunch, or dinner. We continued eating that chicken with wide noodles and the rich hoisin sauce because there was nothing else to do; because we had forgotten how to order anything else; because Will the intercultural interloper was looking for some savory dish of an experience to bring home with him after his year abroad and serve piping hot to my friends and family and potential colleagues. Internationalism was social currency.
I took another bite; the dish was cold. We put our napkins down, said our goodbyes, and went to our separate apartments where we would listen to different music sung in tones that were linguistically comprehensible but emotionally unintelligible.
We walked out, leaving behind the tea in our glasses; it tasted like water but called itself tea.
We walked through the trees, and the snow, and there was no sound but your breath and the resounding glances we would take deep into each other’s eyes in the darkness among the firm, old oaks. Perhaps they weren’t oaks.
We walked deep into the recesses of the small park, standing between the saplings and trying to find solace from whatever you called ‘reality.’ We stood still like the trees, embracing like long lost lovers who knew that after years of waiting, there could only be this last moment, and then nothing.
We were quiet, sentimental, and your touch was delicate and soft, like the powdered snow that rested on the ground and surrounded our feet. There was only this moment and nothing else: the sweet black of your eyes and your short hair and the way your head warmed my hands.
You whispered that it was our last night together, and I wished secretly that we could somehow be unstuck from time’s cruel forward assault, that we could be light, not carrying any of the weight that our feet did as they trudged among the soft, urban snow.
There was no rustle in the branches, no sound of birds moving to build a nest or tend to their bellies; there was only the movement of our winter jackets as we slowly made each other feel okay again, tenderly changing my grip around your back, wanting to hold you in every way possible. But the snow was fresh and comforting and it hugged our feet and seemed to beckon them into submission: “don’t move,” it breathed.
Then I heard an inevitable car’s honk and realized that it was probably close to 1AM and that you would return to your dormitory soon; I would be left alone, once more. My feet were cold and I needed to blow my nose and so I unzipped my jacket pocket and pulled out the tissue, as white as snow, and blew into it the reality of my body—the warm, contrasting truth that now needed a garbage bin so as not to be considered ‘littering,’ so as not to ruin the idyllic scene that we had made, painted, for ourselves. I walked out of the clearing and over to the bright yellow box and tossed the tissue inside its dark recesses. I came back and you were there waiting but it was different. Your phone rang; it was your roommate.
We left the place where you had hidden your memory, your moment, deep within your heart; that forest that was filled with ancient oaks and resplendent redwoods carved deep into the glistening, radiant moon-filled snow that went up to our knees and kept us there for eternity. For you, the sun never came up, the birds never started their busy day, the cars were nowhere to be found, and the only thing that moved was our pulsing hearts as we stayed there, frozen, wrapped in an unrelenting embrace that was sweet and tender and, never to end.
You told me that nobody had ever made you feel this way, that you were your true self with me. Then you said goodbye.
I kissed you and it felt as though it were a mere stamp upon something inevitable, like a formality added at the last second to fulfill some sort of bureaucratic protocol. There was nothing real in it, because every second that the kiss lasted for was just a reminder that I was so much closer to the kiss’s conclusion—our own sudden, clear-cut consummation.
It ended. It had to, it seems. I looked at you and sensed a disconnect—suddenly, we weren’t inhabiting the same place anymore: you were still in that imaginary forest dreaming about our eternal moment. You were there, back in the warm blanket you’d knitted of knee-deep shimmering snow; but I was standing next to my apartment on the pavement, the materials that had been constructed by the Chinese provincial government in the 1990’s in order to attract the Han Chinese to come and live in this city—this pile of smog and concrete—of crumbling apartment buildings with questionable construction.
She said goodbye, turning the other way faster than I ever expected. She didn’t turn around; she was gone. I wanted to cough: to show her that things weren’t pure and clean like she wanted, imagined, in her delirium. Suddenly, I became angry—knew that she would never feel how I felt and hated her for her ability to transcend this place—this hard concrete hell—and replace it with that pillow of imaginary snow, that same frozen-water-substance that had left its mark on my wet and frozen feet. I shivered.
Conversations with a Deaf Uyghur 