Thursday, January 22, 2009

dreams

Sometimes, it is in waking that I sleep.

Who has not felt it? I slough the dreamy fog of days and wake to worlds alive and bright. In my dreams there is a mission, a purpose, a gasp of breath, a shout. There is horror also, and fear, and hate. There is a darkness older than man, and I am let to wallow in it as I claw my way back to the world.

And in my dreams, too, there is a burning sun warming an endless sea. And there is hope. And there is love. And the bounds of earthly concern are loosed, and I am set upon the sky a constellation. And I am wrought of sterner, stronger stuff than in my waking dream.

I have lived full lives in my dreams. I have gone from child to man to old man in the space of a night. I have left the memoirs and testaments of lifetimes in the impression on a pillow, and I have seen those lives fade in my mind’s eye as quickly as their epithet.

Do they watch me from some other place, my dream selves? Old and young alike. Do they dream of me even as I dream of them? Or are they simply wisps carried on the breeze of imagination? Perhaps they live in me somehow, even as they fall victim to morning’s light. Perhaps they gain life eternal, locked in some small part of my mind that remembers their existence if not their stories.

What tremendous responsibility I bear, then: the weight of those thousand pasts all resting on my shoulders. Have those of me who have gone to pasture in my mind bestowed upon me their will to be? If I am their only hope, if only through me can they reclaim their forgotten world, then I am a scion to that forgotten pantheon. The one last hope.

And have I hoped, in my dreams, not to fade? When I open my eyes on a new day, and, for a time, look on the world with a mind not my own, but that of a dream-self clinging to life, I truly think so.

And I like to think there is triumph when trailing tendrils of sleep wrap themselves about me, and I am borne again to the sea.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Sino-Malady

I was told by many before I got here that the first thing that you are required to do upon arriving in China is to get sick. Every traveler I’d met told me to prepare for the worst; they told me that the mixture of smog, questionable drinking water, un-FDA-ified food products, and general filth was a sort of reverse catholicon, ensuring a uniquely horrifying sickness experience for one and all.

And so I arrived in Beijing determined not to succumb to that dreaded infirmity. At first, despite the mixture of jet-lag and confusion lowering my overall immunity, I felt fairly confident that I would make it. I was steered clear of shady food by my friend and temporary host, Chet, I felt none of the telltale signs of sickness that I have come to know so well, and I avoided tap water like the plague (which, ironically, it possibly contained).

But 5000 years of history and viral circulation was not to be denied, and on my 6th day I awoke well before dawn with the first of many hints that I might be succumbing: uncontrollable diarrhea. From approximately 3:30AM to 6AM, I made at least 15 trips to the bathroom, the last few during which I’m almost certain I evacuated several of my back teeth. At 6AM, however, I received a much needed reprieve as the flow of traffic suddenly reversed, and I, in the space of a few seconds, reenacted the entire consumption of my dinner from the previous evening in reverse. It was quite a show.

Exhausted by the performance, I curled up for a quick nap on the bathroom floor. After a few moments, however, the rumblings in my stomach suggested that I take that nap sitting up, which I did. Eventually I dragged myself back to my makeshift bed in Chet’s study, and sank into a deep coma-like sleep.

Around 7:30AM I received another clue to the origins of my ordeal as Chet approached my door, swaying unsteadily like a zombie, to inquire if I, too, was feeling ill. I informed him that not only was I feeling ill, but that I had been sharing some disturbingly intimate moments with his guest bathroom for the past several hours.

“Throwing up helped,” I weakly suggested to him as he staggered back to his room. Later, what sounded like a bear attempting to sing Pavarotti began to audition in the master bathroom. The most I could muster was a muted chuckle as I pulled the blankets over my head and was consumed again by sleep.

Apparently, the food that we had ordered delivered the night before contained traces of some nameless evil that rendered the two of us useless for the remainder of the day. I spent most of the day sleeping, and the rest waking up in strange places and wondering how I got there. For variety, I interspersed this with uncontrollable shivering and more bathroom escapades.

Curled up in the bottom of the tub with shower water beating down on me, lying prone in a patch of sunlight on Chet’s living room floor, sprawled across a wooden bench with a Tonka truck as a pillow, and sitting at the kitchen counter with my moist forehead resting perfectly in the rim of a lukewarm mug of tea were only a few of the strange places I regained consciousness that day.

Chet and I crossed paths occasionally, in our wanderings around the apartment. We would grunt what neither of us was sure was a greeting or a dry heave at each other and continue on our meanderings. We were much like the walking dead…only aimless as if all the humans had already died. Suffice it to say that we both eventually recovered. The next day we were both more or less convalesced, leading us to believe that it must have been one of those 24 hour poisonings.

In my errant anticipation, I had thought that the sickness would come for me from the skies in the form of bad air quality lowering my immunity. But, as if sensing my wariness towards that angle of attack, the insidious affliction hid itself in an unsuspecting carton of sweet and sour chicken. I almost wish that I had been less vigilant and let nature (well, actually, the opposite of nature) run its course, for in my futile calculations I failed to factor in the risk that my friend and comrade Chet might become the collateral damage of my initiation illness.