Fiction by Cassandra Neyenesch. She flipped through the diary, looking for her name. Was she hoping not to find herself, or did a perverse part of her want to?
“Long Life!” the police would say every hour or so, holding out the pack and shaking it at him. “Long Life,” the backpacker would reply with a chuckle, and wave a hand in front of his face to say, No, thank you.
Long Life cigarettes smelled like early death and bitter, frustrated dreams. At twenty-five cents a pack, they were considered a medium-status brand, still a splurge for most people in China. Foreigners might have smoked them just to be cool and ironic, if they weren’t so awful. The backpacker’s refusal seemed to hurt the policemen’s feelings, and they would raise the stakes with each offer, nagging, scolding, and, by the fifth time, practically shouting, “Long Life! LONG LIFE!” The backpacker, not understanding that cigarettes were the main currency in an elaborate networking system, and that he was essentially rejecting their offer of friendship, looked more and more confused. Martha watched all of this unfold from the flip-down seat by the window next to the Dutchman’s lower bunk. She was enjoying the whole scene and, especially, the policemen’s outfits. They looked like members of the Village People, with their giant aviator sunglasses and tight khaki uniforms tucked into high-heeled black boots. Between them sat a peasant with matted hair and a padded coat over his shoulders. From time to time, as the policemen were yelling “Long Life!” at the backpacker, one of them would stick a cigarette in the peasant’s mouth and light it, as if to demonstrate what civilized men did. When the train stopped for three hours outside Guiyang, the backpacker finally admitted defeat and accepted a cigarette. That seemed to break the ice. Where were the foreigners headed? one of the policemen asked, crossing his booted legs and dragging on his cigarette. “Oh, Guilin! Wonderful city!” The other policeman quoted a Tang Dynasty poem: The river winds, a green silk ribbon . . . The first policeman, using the plural “you,” suggested that they try stuffed river snails, a famous Guilin delicacy. The Dutch backpacker, possibly not knowing how to say that he and Martha were not together, gave her a sidelong look. Martha clarified, “I’m also going to Guilin, but we don’t know each other.” “You don’t know each other?” The police were astonished. What were the odds? Two foreigners in the same bunk! And they even looked alike. Martha and the Dutch boy glanced at each other again and blushed. Visually speaking, they were the same sort of white person, both sallow and long-nosed, with that ashy color of hair that is neither blond nor brown. He had a beardless, pretty, androgynous face that reminded Martha of a member of a New Wave band. But he wore a red bandanna around his head, like a Canadian Waldorf-school teacher. Martha had already discounted the possibility of anything sexual happening between them, partly because of the bandanna. But who was she to judge? She was wearing an embroidered Uyghur men’s hat. Mostly she’d stopped believing in sex. Not that she didn’t want it, just that she no longer thought it could happen for her here. After six months of backpacking, Martha was feeling very Taoist, very detached, just a big naked eyeball wandering around, absorbing all the astonishing things there were to see at the frayed edges of a defunct feudal empire. A person who was naturally solitary could become even more molded by solitude, to the point that she was afraid to let anyone take it away from her. She could not keep having interactions, real interactions involving sentences; she just wanted to eat a bowl of noodles and go on her way. She wasn’t interested in other foreigners, period, and she was definitely not here to speak English, which she already knew. If she felt that she was getting weird, she would attach herself to a group of backpackers at one of those cafés that catered to their longings for coffee, bread, and other exotic specialties. But foreigners were expensive; they kept playing cards and ordering smoothies and french fries and “pizza,” and she would feel her remaining money draining away as if it were her life force. She turned back to her book, “Gunnar’s Daughter,” a slender Norwegian novel about date rape in the Viking world. Every conversation ended in a stabbing. So far, Martha was cautiously intrigued, but it was impossible to concentrate. Long Life cigarette smoke was making her nauseated and hungry, and she had nothing to eat but some oily fried beans she couldn’t stand to look at anymore. “The East Is Red” and other patriotic songs played maddeningly in an endless loop on the scratchy sound system, and, just when she thought she would spontaneously combust, the train stopped in a town called Flower-something and idled there long enough for people on the platform to thrust Styrofoam lozenges of food through the windows at the passengers and for the passengers to thrust money back at them. In the transition that occurred—the shift in the quality of the silence between Martha and the Dutch boy as they inspected the contents of their lunch lozenges and rubbed their chopsticks together to remove the splinters—he asked, “What are you reading?” With a game-show flourish, Martha indicated the legend beneath the author’s name, “Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.” “Eh . . . must be pretty good then?” Martha laughed. “Gunnar’s Daughter” was exactly the sort of harrowing, realist “good” novel that washed up on hostel bookshelves. She theorized that backpackers liked them because the miserable lives of the characters made the agony of a hard sleeper car seem relatively endurable. Being on the top bunk of three tended to make you ponder the deeper questions of existence—the patriotic songs wailing a foot from your ear, food and water and toilet so far away down a long ladder. And yet your sufferings would come to an end in a mere fifty-seven hours, or whenever the train disgorged you, while the sufferings of Gunnar’s daughter would probably end only with her death. “I think it’s because the Chinese censors don’t allow Western novels into the country unless they’re depressing,” the Dutch boy said. “Because they make our society look bad?” Martha said, devastated, knowing that he was probably right. Another theory deflated. The Dutch boy’s name was Joost. As the train made the long approach to Guilin, he and Martha scooched closer and talked in lowered voices while the policemen rearranged the peasant’s jacket over his shoulders and gave him sips of tea from a jelly jar. Hours and hours of rolling green hills and rice paddies passed by the windows, the pale pools amid the shoots flashing bits of sky. No one would talk to them about anything real, they agreed. They didn’t blame people for being cautious—they understood that it wasn’t safe. The Tiananmen Square massacre had been only five years before. What Chinese people did like to talk about, a lot, was the price of goods and services in the U.S.A., which they called Beautiful Country. A ten-speed bicycle, for example, what did it cost in Beautiful Country? A car? A washing machine? It was a delicious shock for them to hear how expensive things were in Beautiful Country. It seemed to imply that people had the money to buy those wonderful things. They all wanted to immigrate to Beautiful Country, every single person Martha met. If she warned them about the inequality and racism in Beautiful Country, they would say, “Oh, right, your social problems, uh-huh, we heard about those. What about a refrigerator? What does a refrigerator cost?” Beautiful Country was definitely winning the twentieth century. That was clear to everyone at this point. “America! No. 1!” people would tell Martha, giving her a thumbs-up. Why, though? they seemed to be asking her. How had a callow upstart nation on the edge of nowhere become No. 1, the baby, the favorite child of history? What had Great China done to become so unloved by fate? Joost said that he got it worse. Holland, mm-hmm, tulips, windmills. But have you been to Beautiful Country? Stupid Beautiful Country. The police were feeding anise-flavored watermelon seeds to the peasant, who cracked them expertly between his teeth and spat the shells onto the floor. Martha was transfixed by a realization: the peasant’s hands were cuffed behind his back. She hadn’t noticed before, with his coat draped over his shoulders. He was a prisoner the police were transporting, possibly a fugitive. So many impossible things happened in China every day that it hadn’t struck her as odd that the policemen were treating him like a big, scruffy baby. Martha told Joost about a boy who had followed her from the youth hostel in Beijing, asking her the usual questions: Where you come from? How you like China? He was gaunt and brutally handsome, with a face like a cube someone had punched to make features, and had the general nerviness of a guy who had got up that morning planning to approach a Western girl. Martha, bored, had tried an experiment. When the boy had asked her how much she’d spent on her Nikes, she’d asked him if he thought there would ever be free speech in China. She wasn’t a total idiot—she’d waited until there was no one else around to overhear them as they had turned onto one of those endless Beijing streets that is just a series of compound gates. She imagined that, here, they would finally break through this barrier of silence between them and commune deeply about things that affected them as humans. But the boy had become impatient and sullen, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket. “I don’t want to talk about history,” he’d said. “I’m tired of history. Nobody wants to talk about it.” Martha had suddenly understood that she was being naïve, American, a huge asshole. She should have known this. She’d taken so much Chinese history in college she felt like she’d almost lived through the Cultural Revolution. Wars, famines, purges—why don’t we let the teen-agers kill all the professionals? That sounds like a good idea. And just when they’d started to have a bit of hope for something else, the tanks had come and mowed it all down again. If she didn’t understand that, she couldn’t understand him at all. Fuck history. The price of sneakers was his problem. “I WANT TO TALK ABOUT BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY!” It was like a whole relationship that Martha didn’t want to have, in forty-five minutes. She felt terrible, but she needed to get away from him as fast as possible. She ran into the Forbidden City, where she knew he couldn’t afford the entry fee, and stared at dusty rooms behind smudged plexiglass for two hours. And he waited. “Would you like to split a double room at the hostel?” he said. “I have this durian. For once, I would like to eat the whole thing.” He opened his pack and pulled out a durian the size of a dinosaur egg, covered in woody thorns. Then he pulled out a machete. Wait, Martha thought. Is this a sex thing? On the other hand, it made sense—wanting a private room in order to eat a durian. They were notoriously stinky fruits; you could never cut one open in a dorm situation. Later, in their double at the hostel, Joost hacked at the durian over a copy of People’s Daily. The flesh looked like a human brain and smelled like rotten hamburger meat wrapped in gym socks wrapped in butt. Martha sat on the other bed and thought about what a perverse species humans were—to insist on eating something that had tried so hard to be inedible. That night, Joost wanted to dine at a real restaurant like rich foreigners. “Come on, it’s so cheap!” he said. They shared an appetizer and two vegetable dishes, and he had a meat dish, plus beer. Joost spoke in a soft, amused tone, prefacing his sentences with, “Eh . . . yeah?,” his head always cocked, in Martha’s imagination, if not in reality. He was likable and easygoing—she kept thinking the word “amiable”—but there was something he was holding back. He was almost too polite. They talked about the fugitive and the police on the train, wondering what the man had done, if he was a murderer, and feeling that the policemen in go-go boots had been very sweet with him, almost tender. It was as if the Chinese instinct for nurturing through creature comforts was stronger than whatever made the police the police. After a few days of this—sleeping in the same room, eating all their meals together, not having sex—it felt as though they were practically married. Still, it was awkward between them, this unanswered question: Sex? On the third night, Joost stopped being polite. Over dinner, he made fun of her for being a pescatarian, then ordered rabbit, snake, stuffed river snails—the cutest or most disgusting things on the menu—just to annoy her. She was annoyed and called him a dick. He seemed to take that as encouragement and got another round of Five Star beers. On the way back to the hostel, Martha drunkenly confessed that she’d had a fantasy about the fugitive. The train had crashed and she and the fugitive had survived, and he had told her a super dramatic and horrible story about his life—he was a dissident on the run—and they had fallen in love. Then they’d had to steal food while evading the authorities, either escaping to Vietnam, or else coming to a tearful reckoning that they could never be together and parting ways. She and Joost were walking along the Lijiang river watching a woman paddle a market raft. Fog wrapped the bottom of the cone-shaped hills and a wet breeze blew off the water. Martha was shivering. She’d never shared that particular dark corner of her mind with a boy before—the Harlequin Romance part. “Here,” Joost said, unwinding his Cambodian scarf to give to her. It smelled of him, earthy in a surprisingly clean and herbal way, like chamomile tea. “So it’s true,” he said. “You really think life is a movie, you Americans?” The playful way he said this made her laugh. “As if you don’t have fantasies.” “Not silly ones like that.” Back in the room, Joost initiated some tussling, some tickling, and was, as it turned out, extremely good at oral sex. Then he pretended that he was the fugitive and it was their first time. It was fun; Martha had not done sexual role-play since she was nine or ten, with other girls. Her last and only boyfriend, Tim, would have been too inhibited. “I never liked cunnilingus before,” she said, all aglow with post-orgasmic triumph. “Maybe that’s because you call it cunnilingus.” “What do you call it?” “Eh, yeah . . . we have a verb.” He said a word she couldn’t pronounce right no matter how hard she tried. Beffen? The Dutch were apparently very particular about their unaspirated “B”s. They spent the next week wandering Guilin and the outlying towns that backpackers liked, talking in a stream-of-consciousness way. Martha learned Joost’s entire history: his bipolar mother, his absent father, his battles with depression. He’d grown up in a commune, raised by three women with fairy-tale names—Agatha, Leneke, and Ineke—so the bandanna, she thought, was forgivable. Martha complained about her evil stepmother, who thought she was literally allergic to the planet and had made Martha’s father move to the Sonoran Desert to live in a geodesic dome. And Martha wasn’t even allowed to visit because of “contamination risk.” It all emerged in this altered state; nothing had more weight than anything else. Sex bound them together as long as they were together, the swimming warmth of the double bed, skin and limbs and hair. It’s enough for now, Martha thought. It was unlike her and made her feel a little distanced from herself—not in a bad way, maybe. She loved not having to sleep in a dorm, and she loved beffen, and Joost recited an existential Dutch poem to her: Why squirrel? Because in a tree he. In Yangshuo, they fell in with some kids from Tel Aviv, who were sitting in a café playing whist , and Martha wondered, Do they think we’re boyfriend-girlfriend?, and caught Joost’s eye. He didn’t seem to care. Maybe the pretense was comforting to him, too. The illusion of having a person who was your anchor to the world as it spun around you. Sometimes Martha would look at Joost over dinner, her chopsticks poised in her hand, and think, After a week from now, I will never, ever see this person again, and then wait to see how she felt. A bit psychotic, actually. “Shenme?” Joost would say in Mandarin. “What?” She would reply, “This fish-flavored fish is pretty good to eat!” and give him a thumbs-up. It was as if he were an experiment in not caring and, at the same time, in fucking. As if she were exploring the exact balance between having sex and giving a shit, like in an essay for one of her women’s-studies classes: Explore the relationship/causality between being in love and achieving sexual satisfaction with someone. Are these necessarily direct values? Could it be argued that in some sense every sex act is a fleeting pantomime of love? She didn’t want to go back to Beautiful Country. She wanted to keep being a giant eyeball. She’d decided to try Taipei, where, people said, you could easily earn twenty dollars an hour teaching English. She sat for a while, not really thinking about that. Joost’s journal, bound in moss-green cloth, lay on the bedside table. Something Martha admired about Joost, besides his unflappable amiability in the face of annoying situations, was the diligence with which he kept his journal, which he wrote in every morning as he drank his tea. She had a journal but wrote in it only sporadically, mostly to vent about her fights with street venders. By now, at the end of their second week together, she’d begun to suspect that, one, Joost was secretly a romantic dude, and, two, he was some kind of aspiring writer, and, three, he unconsciously wanted her to read his journal. He was almost dramatically evasive about the content of his entries—were they diaristic, observational, lyrical?—but he mentioned the journal often, making fun of himself for lugging around the six notebooks he’d already filled in, and saying that he wrote mostly in English because his favorite writers were Henry Miller and the Beat poets. Also, he left it around. The shower was still running—he was very clean. Martha picked up the journal and opened it to the first page. In small, meticulous print, Joost described watching a girl in a miniskirt biking along the road, and how he was going to push her off her bike and pound her good with his big, hard cock and make her squeal like the whore pig she was. Martha turned the pages, finding more fantasies of Joost accosting girls in public places and humiliating them sexually, like Henry Miller but worse. It was at least, maybe, not racist, as some of the girls were white. She flipped through, looking for her name. Was she hoping not to find herself, or did a perverse part of her want to? Clashing forms of disgust made her feel something like motion sickness, and she dropped the book. She was shutting down, spiralling. She had to get out of the room—luckily, she hadn’t unpacked yet. She grabbed her backpack and left the hostel. Were all men sexually gross? Why was everything so gross? Was that what it meant to be an adult, that you just accepted that everything was gross? The thing is, another part of her brain chimed in, I didn’t know that the last time we had sex was going to be the last time. And that’s just kind of not fair. Martha didn’t want to be a prude. She and Joost were nothing to each other long-term. Did she really have to care that he had rapey fantasies? Couldn’t she just sleep with him in a comfortable bed a few more times, eat, drink beer, and forget that she’d read that? Night fell, and Martha came to a small black lake. From the shore, she could hear a brass band playing somewhere. The notes bounced over the lapping water, and people’s voices came in fragments. It was one of those transient moments she lived for: something overwhelming about life seized her, and she experienced a kind of stunned bliss. But her back hurt from her lumpy pack, and she suddenly understood that there were people out there, groups of people who belonged together, families, friends, lovers, that she could hear but not see in this magical darkness by a lake. She was alone again. That was the trade-off for giving up her solitude—how she felt her aloneness when the other person was gone. If she walked into the lake and let her backpack drag her under and drown her, no one would care. Here was the thing: Joost was good at sex, for someone who said he’d had only one girlfriend and few hookups—attentive, patient, persistent. With Tim, Martha hadn’t often come during intercourse. She hadn’t come much, really. She hadn’t come at all. She had never once come while having intercourse with Tim. It hadn’t seemed important. She’d felt like she might come. She was so in love; he smelled like a person and also like a freshly baked croissant. He was her total feminist dreamboat, a guy who, upon waking up to find all his clothes dirty, would be perfectly willing to wear some of her clothing to go to brunch. A boy who loved to dance, who let his curly hair grow wild, who never in his life called anyone bro, who was a music major with a minor in art history. More than this, or in spite of this, Tim was clever and silly. They had, as LL Cool J said, a lot of private jokes to share. And then, after four years together, Tim had dumped her, with the words “I’m sorry. I just really need to fuck someone else.” It happened at the Art Institute of Chicago. They were looking at collages by the artist Keiichi Tanaami in which some highly sexualized images of big-breasted women repeated horribly, like flashbacks. Martha was reading that Tanaami, a survivor of the Second World War, had been meditating on violence when he made these works. If repeated images of sexy women somehow equated to violence, she wondered aloud, what did that say about the male imagination? Were men traumatized by their own penises? In a way, Tim replied, his sexual thoughts were as relentless as that. Like he didn’t really control them; he wasn’t driving the thing. “Wow,” Martha said, with a feeling of everything clicking into place. “You’re describing P.T.S.D.” When she was nine, she had been in a car accident that had killed her mother. Splinters of memory still punctured reality when she was driving on the highway, and she would feel a compulsion to crash. That was how it sounded to her to be besieged by graphic sexual imagery at all times—so unrelenting, so unstoppable that you might as well let the fantasies pass through you, the same way she occasionally noticed a racist thought in her mind and went, Well, that’s not good, but now that I’ve noticed it I can let it go. Or something like that? Tim said, “Yeah, pretty much.” Then he looked serious. “Since you brought it up . . .” Over the course of the next, endless day, Tim talked to her so candidly about his need to fuck other women and how he never thought about a single other thing that later, in the alone period after the dumping, Martha felt completely desexed. She was not a woman; she was barely human. She had transformed from being someone Tim wanted to fuck, and therefore lied to about his other desires, into an erotic nonentity to whom he could tell the truth. “You read my journal.” Joost looked stricken but in a fake way, as if he’d thought about what his reaction should be. “You shouldn’t have done that. It’s a violation of my privacy.” Martha had guessed that he would say something like this and realized how completely she didn’t care. “We’re about to go our separate ways, so if I’m an untrustworthy person, you don’t have to worry about that ever again.” Martha’s father, a law professor, had trained her to be a rational, step-by-step arguer. Let the court stipulate: I don’t care about invading your privacy and nothing you say will make me feel guilty about doing it. “But I am concerned that you write about raping people every day.” Joost seemed to accept this. He was not an arguer at all. He sat down on the bed and said that he didn’t mean it, he just loved Henry Miller, so he pretended to be Henry Miller in his journal. Martha sat down next to him. “But Henry Miller is terrible. He is, like, the worst writer.” “I’ve always wished I could be a cool guy like him, though. Like a guy who has sex with lots of girls. But I never wrote that way about you.” Now Martha was filled with a strange emotion she’d never experienced before, a tender, maternal pity. She felt such sorrow for the state of this man that she wanted to cradle him in her arms like Mary with the body of Jesus. She wanted to make a Pietà scene with Joost, emotionally, and hold him for a long time. Another part of her knew that she absolutely did not want that. The whole reason she’d had sex with him in the first place was because it was temporary, and her stupid bimbo body couldn’t brainwash her into thinking that she loved him. She was the first to break away, turning and climbing onto the train without a word. From her seat, she watched him walk away, a hand on each strap of his technical European backpack, his feet splayed in well-worn Birkenstocks. So that was that. A woman with a teen-age daughter and glasses like a pair of headlights stared at Martha hungrily from the facing seat, as if she wanted to ask what a college education cost in America. As “The East Is Red” cranked up on the P.A. system, Martha bent over her pack and rummaged for “Gunnar’s Daughter,” the bloody Viking novel. Her torso had the strafed, torn-up feeling she usually got when she was fighting with a vender. She hoped that the ambitious-looking woman in the opposite seat would not try to speak English with her. ♦
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