JARRETT WOKE UP halfhanging off a sheetless bed of wooden slats barely big enough for one person, let alone two. A thin wool pad did little to spare his back from the wood. Jarrett touched the floor with his toes, a slat shifting under his bottom. His back throbbed. His stomach rumbled. The ceiling was spinning. He closed his eyes and pressed the corners with his thumbs.
When he opened his eyes, the ceiling had not stopped spinning. He swallowed the acidic aftertaste of last night and struggled upright on uncertain feet. He was missing a sock. He squeezed his eyes with his thumbs again.
The room was a concrete shell. Bars on the window, no net to stop the mosquitoes. A lightbulb dangled from a chain attached by a hook to the ceiling. Jarrett looked around for a switch or a cord, and dizzy, he closed his eyes again.
He took several deep breaths. He opened his eyes. The cord for the lightbulb was tangled in the chain’s links. He looked around the room once more, careful not to shift his eyes. His pants were wadded up in the corner and he tottered over to them, thin tiles sliding underfoot. Only when he went to put on his pants did he realize the condom was still on, hanging from the tip of his limp penis, swollen with last night’s semen.
Jarrett took another deep breath. “Fuck.”
He went into the bathroom, where another lightbulb dangled from a chain. He left the bulb alone, and tugged the condom off. For lack of a trashcan, he dropped the used condom in the squat toilet, where it lay like a crippled slug on the porcelain. He bent down, wincing at the aftertaste burning up his throat, and pinched the condom and flung it into the hole.
With the condom disposed of, Jarrett left the bathroom. He put on his pants and sat on the edge of the bed, shaking. He wiped his mouth with his shirt. The girl from last night was Chinese and spoke English in an Italian accent. It wasn’t Angel who’d introduced them. Jarrett, countless beers and several shots deep, had spotted her making eyes at him. It was the Molly’s last night all over again, except this time Jarrett wouldn’t let her sidetrack him into a balcony conversation. This time there was no one to stand in his way.
Jarrett’s head was bobbing. Yes, spoke English with an Italian accent. Her name? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t know if she’d even offered it. He hugged himself. First things first, get out of here, grab some street food. Spend the day resting, maybe work on his writing.
He counted to three and rose, and patted his pants. His wallet was there, but it felt wrong. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and opened it in the daylight pushing shyly past the barred window where mosquitoes could drift in and out at their leisure.
All his cash was gone.
His bankcard was gone.
With his free hand, Jarrett patted his pockets. “No fucking way,” he whispered, and his throat ached when he spoke aloud.
His phone was gone too.
“No,” and the acidic aftertaste showed no mercy. He couldn’t remember what he’d eaten, if anything, and what he drank? After a while, did it matter?
He didn’t run so much as he hobbled to the bathroom like a poisoned man in a frenzied search for an antidote. He crashed to his knees, pain slanting up into his hips, and the acidic aftertaste won.
He puked into the squat toilet. He dryheaved twice, his eyes watering. Then he puked again, vomit splashing onto his pants, and as his body expelled last night, he recognized the taste after all: baijiu. It tasted like baijiu.
He puked.
#
This pitiful wreck of a man stumbled into the hallway. Last night, a displaced blur, like the memories of a stranger who’d hijacked his body. The girl’s eyes. She spoke in an Italian accent, but her eyes. They were dead at all times.
There were four doors in this hallway, none numbered, only peepholes marking them. He didn’t know where Angel was or if Angel had taken someone home—he likely had. The man paid for sex as casually and as often as people filled up their tanks.
Jarrett shuffled to the window at the end of the hall. What greeted him through the bars and the duststreaked windowglass was another drab wall. He turned around.
Plastic flaps curtained the doorway at the end of the hall. Jarrett made his way toward them. Angel preferred Western hotel chains like Ramada, but he was hardly above slumming it. If he had come here, but after meeting that girl’s eyes, Jarrett had no recollection of Angel. For all he knew, Angel was in class right now, warming up his kindergartners for English games to keep them busy till the bell.
Jarrett pushed through the flaps. No one at the front desk. An analog clock ticked on the wall above it, giving the time as the afternoon, and Jarrett told himself the clock was wrong. It had to be morning.
He pushed past a heavier set of plastic flaps and sneezed twice in the newly humid air, catching the first sneeze with his hands and letting the second one fly free onto the pavement. Jarrett looked up and down the backstreet. Gray clouds skirted the rooftops. Signs for shops, printing services, netbars. A little girl hopped about like a kangaroo under the tender gaze of her grandmother.
He walked the backstreets, turning this way or that way. One backstreet led to another, which led to another, and Jarrett paused to get his bearings many times, certain he’d crossed over this ground before. He sought out the signs for restaurants and netbars like desert signposts and a backstreet widened and a cargotruck coughed by kicking up dustclouds Jarrett sneezed he wiped his eyes and in his clouded vision four men in camouflage coveralls trekked the embers of a bombed city. Their eyes spectral behind gas masks. Cords for hydration coiled in a groove above the air canisters. The two men in the middle held opposite ends of a black trashbag and they came upon a corpse charred into anonymity and the two outer men seized the corpse by the shoulders and tossed it into the bag with no effort the bag did not swell with its new weight and the men carried on their apex march across the ruinous cityscape.
Jarrett was sitting down, leaning against the wall, and he remembered doing neither. Rain fell and Jarrett looked up into the smog, his eyes burning.
#
He stirred when the rain stopped. He got moving again. He cast his eyes from side to side, his shirt spiderwebbed to his chest and stomach. A few times he stopped to find his bearings but there were none to find. No more rain fell from the milky sky and the air was thick enough to drown in.
The backstreet widened and he followed a main road where a pack of businessmen poured through glass doors and a rag woman lay on the grimey pavement hugging a malnourished toddler clad in shreds of colorless cloth sucking her thumb her cheeks stamped with tracks of grime like a tribal tattoo, towers of mirrored windows rising over all. Traffic stalled on a left turn at a four-way intersection and the lights changed and the newly summoned traffic pulled as close as they could to the turning vehicles, all honking, and as Jarrett forded the gridlock he winced from a car horn.
Jarrett plodded along a path arranged by caution cones. A cement truck backed into a gravel pit. Migrant workers toiled antlike in the skeletal infancy of a highrise. An accented cry on repeat reached his ears, “Mantou! Lao mian mantou!”, lao rhyming with low in a woman’s Hebei pronunciation. The megaphone and speaker were roped to the handlebars of an electric scooter, a white container roped to the backseat. A man in a cheap suit placed his order and the woman opened the container and wrapped a steamed bun in baking paper and Jarrett’s eyes followed the bread from the woman’s bare and grimey hand to the man like a pyromaniac salivating over a lit match. He judged the time it would take for her to react, and how fast he could move. He closed in on the bike and reached out to touch the container.
“Ni gan ma?” the woman asked.
“Nothing,” Jarrett whispered. It still hurt to speak.
He moved on. Shivering, strangely chilly despite the heat. He reached the bridge. An elevator and a set of stairs led to the walkway and before the elevator sat a woman at a long table.
She smiled a smile of missing teeth at him. “San kuai.”
It cost three RMB to ride the elevator. “I can’t bear the stairs,” Jarrett said. He didn’t understand the woman’s reply. He waved her off and with a grunt set a foot on the first step.
He fell to his knees at the top, eyes closed against the consequences of last night’s decisions. If he could sleep now and never wake up. He opened his eyes, and with another grunt he gripped the rail and pushed himself to his feet.
The steel walkway shuddered in the passage of large trucks. Upriver a ferry hauled commuters from Hankou to Wuchang, the water fanning out shaped like chevrons in its wake. The suspension cables swayed in a lateday gust and Jarrett sneezed into his shirtsleeve and pulled it back coated in black snot. A flock of blackbirds was perched along the bridge’s railing that reached Jarrett’s neck. Hard to fall by accident. Nothing would prevent purpose. The blackbirds lifted off, a drying inkspill in the paperwhite sky.
It was evening when he reached the other side of the Yangtze River, the milky sky blackening in the last reaches of day. Twilight in the smog, the bloodred cry of the sun’s departure smeared at the end of the earth. A blue barge with mounds of sand like camel humps departed the Han River and sailed southwest on the Yangtze, navigation lights ruby red on the port side of the wheelhouse.
“Sunset on the Han River,” he whispered. “Evening, morning. Who gives a fuck?”
His throat hated him for speaking. Yet, sometimes giving voice to your thoughts is the only way to prevent madness.
He kept going. One foot, then another. One foot, then—he passed a sheetmetal wall behind which cranes swung like clockhands. A streetlight hummed with indifference and passing it Jarrett’s shadow sprouted obliquely up the wall.
He spotted the sign for Ba Yi Lu and teared up. He knew he reeked, though his nose was too clogged to smell anything. With puke crusted on his pants and his legs wobbling as he walked like a man new to it, he passed through the gate to Wuhan University’s second campus unchallenged and crossed over the lobby of the other foreign guest house. The man at the front desk regarded him dubiously from behind a cigarette. Jarrett climbed the stairs. Two washers served four rooms. Jarrett laid a single knock on the last door.
David opened it dressed like he was scheduled for a lecture. “I’d ask have you eaten yet, but in your case it might be a legitimate question.”
Jarrett swallowed, wincing. “I can’t…”
“Wait here. Let me retrieve my wallet. I have a suspicion tonight’s going to be on me.”
