北京麻雀 (Sparrows of Beijing)

北 Beijing 2008 - 13

16

A little restaurant of the 3rd Row

Beijing

2008

It was a typical restaurant, and it was packed even though it was extraordinarily late – in fact, the evening crowd was dawdling with the last portions of the meal – while the early morning crowd was entering in, feasting on dumplings and wontons. They were of the evening crowd – and we're trying to broach the topic of deciding whether or not to formally live together. But each time one of them struck the nerve, the other one had a hesitation. No one knew where the rapture came from, it was like God had dissented to close their mouths. Even though neither man nor woman believed in such a vision as God. It was a spirit in absentia. So, they prattled on little topics, but their stare was clean and intense, against the white walls and red decorations which spelled out double happiness. She tried to hum the words to Mac the knife, but she did not know all of the transitions.

At one point he was reminded by her not to tip. This was overheard by their waiter. He was surly until he saw the man was going to tip him, and he was nice again. His badge rattled around with “Gāokǎo” as his name.¹

At one point he asked her if she knew the German, which she did not know, though she shook her head, rather than speak. In a crude voice he began, only a little bit of a key, he remembers all the German words to Mac the Knife. He does this because she is not as conversant in speaking German as she was in English. He knew this by the mispronunciations in her song. She knew he winced. It was because she had had a man from Munich some time before, it was one of the affairs from before he met her. They both hummed it together.²

Mackie, welches war dein Preis?

Cymbal crash. Boom boom.

Modernisme c’est mort.

Simple and complex.

Then he finished and looked at her, trying to determine whether she understood what he was trying to say: that he was no good for her. But she brightened because her older sibling transcribed the music and played it for her, somewhat maudlin but with a cheery tone. Then, a smile crept onto her face, and she dreamed about the times they had spent together, dreaming of a time when they could be together. This communicated to him that she did not understand and might never do so.

They left no tip because that was not the custom. They poured forth into the cold air, which was like James Joyce's cold summer in Ulysses, tinged with Tuscany and arabesqued with the old Latin literature of Virgil. Video killed the glitterati star.

Then he turned, and with a face all serious, he intoned:

“A politician compromises, a statesman compromises without becoming compromised.” The was a wag of his tongue after this.

She nodded and understood - would the leaders of their respective countries have politicians or statesmen when the inevitable moment came? “Do you mean like Falstaff and Henry in Shakespeare?”

“Falstaff is a politician and Henry V is a true statesman.”

“But his land in France was lost according to Bloom.”

“Bloom is an ineffable Falstaff.”³

“Maybe I should look for a gentleman scholar.”

They left as he rolled his eyes back, and in a manner, which reminded her of a quote: “Quaint, no more than that, the emblems of leaden strangeness were deeper and darker than richness they unfold was deeper than that. The homophonic rhythm with filoplume paucities was transparent to the ear, and lucent to touch, as hagiography littered the floor.”

Remember Charlie, remember Backer. Count the rotors.⁴

17

He typed. And in typing lost the days, hours, minutes, and seconds of his life on Earth. It was still a long time before the next generation of AI, which was different from the last generation of AI, could wildly overstate its time in the Overton Spatter. And slightly before the CCP could hide the Accident and plain LLM. Hoping that his other life in eternity would continue in an undiscovered time zone with just she and thee.

18

Away on a jetliner from Beijing

2008

The wheels had just shot up, and they were aloft, by accident. He was on the aisle row, and so he did not look out onto the surface of the airway, the absence mocked him. Instead, he was focused inwards on the round face, of the girl he had left behind. A thought of the many moods of her complexity, now that her face would not be coming into view for a time, though for how long a time was yet to be determined. He thought this would be a short visit, a short visit to a dreamland known as China – but instead, it seemed as if China were the real substance, and all else was an illusion, made real by little slips of paper. Whereas here in China, it was made real by the teaming sweat and toil, made real by turning mud and sweat into roads and bridges, and then to apartments and skyscrapers in the blink of an eye. Its outer eye saw people looking at the ground, which was being swallowed up in a blanket of fog, of fog that was rolling in from the north-west being chased by the dry wind, that was even labeled an aerosol by NASA. But that only made him bury his mind inwards, thinking of the many buildings and structures which he had seen. Pressure.⁵

He thought of museums, which were nothing like the museums of the West – which were monuments to a particular time and place, whereas the museums on the ground behind him were a tourist attraction meant to sell objects. Everything beneath him was a chance to sell objects of one fashion or another, which meant that all the world was, in one sense, a museum of now. Each strand of hair, each flowing bit of clothing, each Capitoline shape of a building, was a museum in its own way. It was as if each moment in gesture was captured, in its place and time for all to see.

But it was her face that he thought of, each time he meant to think of something else. He thought of the main question that had entertained him from the beginning – was it her that he was attached to, or not? It might seem like a ridiculous question, but he was more than handsome enough to find another girlfriend, on his side of the water. But there was something about the East which allured him from time immemorial since he was small and there were almost none of the women of the Orient. It was the shape of the face, long before he knew that it was genetic. Long before he knew that it was a blurring. It was an imperative that he did not know the name of. Like a dragon in his gut, it ate on him, like a Tolkien-ish red Dragon from “There and Back Again”, in a prelude to a wonderful world of the imagination of a thin Don. Everyone knows the boat is leaking.

Where did he go? Why did he stop at trivial sites? Remember he had been to Beijing – but for a job, and while buildings in Beijing were different than either America or Europe, the general plan was the same. And once inside a building, especially of a professional nature, there was a consistent quality – and the rooms in a hotel had the same kind of monotonous drabness qua flatfootedness– which came from the professional eyes which were examined from the offices of the hotel. And these offices were the same in that they trained people with the same eye. The difference from bottom to top was more important than the location. But when you went outside and stopped in a room which was for a traveler from the locale, that was designed by local people – who knew what other local people liked. Thus, he wanted to know two things: whether there was a place for him – in terms of places to eat, whether they were from out of town to entice foreigners, or the attractions, such as the tea shops, which would be the highlight of some segment of people; the other thing that he wanted to know, was the scope and layer of the land which she inhabited. He wanted to know about the strange buildings – such as the CCTV building, and the contemporary high-rises, as well as the underbrush which supported it. Small shops doing various things, which would undergird the buildings with all of the things necessary, such as water and food. It was different and the same in the West – dirty little secrets that were brushed aside like yellow flowers in bloom.

In other words, he wanted to know not just the beauty, but the ugly secrets which she hid. What was her brother-in-law like? How did she honor her dead parents? The kinds of secrets that could not be hidden once you are with somebody. Because after all, family was an integral part of who each person was, especially if they were truly foreign. The day was polluted by the wind, and grimy in its nature – it was the capital of the most populous city on the planet. But the night was completely different because all of the grimy and spattered mess of the day was hidden, especially when the sky was ablaze with fireworks that went on through the night. And still in all, he thought of her face, and what thoughts she had when looking at the people and commenting on some hidden feature that they had. It was the foreign twist of her mind that he wanted though he could smell the chemicals.⁶

It was the foreign part of her that he wanted, the tang that he craved. Not just in the countryside, but in her. When he was in Shanghai, the first thing that he realized, was that she was in a foreign land – it was more the same for her than for him, but even the local language was different for her, though she spoke it well. Even the fireworks on this Chinese New Year - gaudy to the eye and running deep into the night – were a clue. Much as the Starbucks was a haven for the Western sensibility. Each of these things was a doorway, because the inside was clean, whereas the outside was a kind of Chinese dirty. Which was to say, it was cluttered dirty, as opposed to the squalid Indian kind of dirty. But that was another tale by a razor sharp.

A tale of far away, in another land, where they did things differently – as they would say about music from long ago.⁷

Mozart perhaps.

1 Gāokǎo is the English name for the National College Entrance Examination.

2 Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne

und die trägt er im Gesicht

und Macheath, der hat ein Messer

doch das Messer sieht man nicht.

Ach, es sind des Haifischs Flossen

rot, wenn dieser Blut vergießt.

Mackie Messer trägt 'nen Handschuh

drauf man keine Untat liest.

An 'nem schönen blauen Sonntag

liegt ein toter Mann am Strand

und ein Mensch geht um die Ecke

den man Mackie Messer nennt.

Und Schmul Meier bleibt verschwunden

und so mancher reiche Mann

und sein Geld hat Mackie Messer

dem man nichts beweisen kann.

Jenny Towler ward gefunden

mit 'nem Messer in der Brust

und am Kai geht Mackie Messer

der von allem nichts gewußt.

Und das große Feuer in Soho

sieben Kinder und ein Greis -

in der Menge Mackie Messer, den

man nicht fragt und der nichts weiss.

Und die minderjährige Witwe

deren Namen jeder weiss

wachte auf und war geschändet -

Mackie, welches war dein Preis?

Wachte auf und war geschändet -

Mackie, welches war dein Preis?

3 See Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human 321

4 From the Vietnam War.

5 A nod to Joel, Pressure ben sûr..

6 Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me With Science”

7 Reference to Hartley, The Go Between