scruta

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.

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.