cerebrate good times » prose experiments

into dreams

Andrew Pouw — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 08:58:01 +0000

The door opens and a man beckons.

We pick a booth in a dimly lit corner. The furnishings are wooden, stained with the hue of a dying hearth smolder. Our table is against a railed window facing the moor. The glass is cracked with crystals and salt. A small candle flickers between us. We are the only ones there.

We wait and I shift in my seat. Marissa looks uneasy. “Where did the waiter go?” she asks. The air is thick and dry. The silence is hollow. Something is missing.

A curtain swishes with a flash of green emerald silk. The hand that thrust it aside belongs to Daniel Wu. It is an entrance to break the tension. “What are you two doing here? Everyone is inside,” he says and helps Marissa out of her seat. He claps me on the back. It rings and I think of metal on sand.

Our steps creaking across the steamboat deck, we cross the gaudy cloth entrance.

We are led to a bar built of reflections and chrome, shining against the blue darkness of an evening sky that bares itself to a transparent wall of minimalist wealth. Men with wingtips for shoes laugh with women framed with shawls of smooth color.

A bored man makes drinks in a vest by the bar.

An angry man stares out the window at the dark, muttering sadly to himself.

Daniel introduces him to us as Mel Gibson.

Gibson turns around and we begin talking. The conversation is pleasant and revealing. The automatons around us carry on with their laughter and pay us no heed. We are the only things in the room that are real.

“Andrew, have you met Gavin Newsom?” asks Daniel, who has sidled up again, now with Adonis in a business suit and tie.

——

The bus is taking us away and back to our lives. The man who is Gibson is laughing at a joke as the street rhythm rolls under us. He begins to explain something through tears of mirth, but when the blanket of sound plummets away from us, his voice rasps heavy against the ear. The bus has stopped in a hush.

We turn around to see one of our medical classmates off the bus. On the street.

Holding a gun to her head.

Twenty medical students have followed her out. Twenty medical students jerk their hands towards her.

She jerks her hand in response, and falls.

The crowd mills quietly. I stand and leave Gibson and Marissa to whisper a word to the woman driving the bus, and turn around to face an old friend. He is sitting slumped in the bus bench, curled up, Kurt Cobain groaning through his headpieces. Unworried. Confident that the world will open itself to him, because he can make it do so.

He glances at me.

“Darren, do you happen to have your emergency tools with you from lab? We have a situation in the back.”

He yawns and nods assent. “Well if you want to see what we did with the tools, I can just show you the dissection,” he says, and slouches even further down in his seat. He unbuttons his trousers and I do not find it odd that he does so. He peels away a pale strip of skin and starts to poke, to prod, and demonstrate roughly. “The inguinal ligament is right here at the inferior fibers of the external abdominal oblique,” and grimaces as he runs a finger along gristle. His own.

I am mildly academically interested.

“And the deep ring is just lateral to the inferior epigastrics.” He probes a bloodless tear in his leg with a weak finger. I have seen this already. I pat him on the shoulder and tell him that it is alright, I just need to go to the back now. He looks up at me from his slouch idly. “You sure? You might need to know something about up here too, I went into all the trouble,” and arches his back,

the curve of his chest rising,
the frame of his ribs cracking,
the whites of his bones shining.

His heart glows a pale blue. It fills his hollow, hard-breathing shell with gentle light. His breath rasps and his eyes drill mine, turning blue too like the dusk of memories dreamed.

———

Andrew wakes up with a start. He showers, dresses, goes to school, and at 3:30 precisely fans into the cadaver laboratory with twenty medical students, hands jerking towards clipboards and pens. Twenty medical students peek at guts tied with string, kidneys sawed in half, nerves hung out to dry, and wonder what they’ll have for lunch.

The examination begins.

——Credits, in order of appearance——-
Marissa, current USC student.
Daniel Wu, urban studies activist abroad.
Mel Gibson, crazy person.
Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco.
Darren Ross, chemical engineer in oil refining, also abroad.
Andrew, medical student.

meanwhile…

Andrew Pouw — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:09:34 +0000

…in Los Angeles, “Second Look” day for prospective USC Keck medical students happened just a few hours ago. Special correspondent Adnin Z. covered the event, during which future classmates arrived in dress attire to hobnob with faculty professors in the school tour and with each other in the bar tour later that evening. Beyond her brief blotter report, our correspondent could not be reached for further commentary, and is presumably recovering from the day’s exertions.

Guests who could not make the event idly sat around on their laptops and twiddled their thumbs. One particular MS-I-in-waiting, who currently is working as a middle school teacher in China, paused in his Saturday research of loan processes and application procedures to reflect on the difference that a year and seven thousand miles makes. A difference of pacing, mostly. Even though he paid arguably more attention to the minutiae of his future life than his elbow-rubbing peers were doing, that was only because he had the time for it and little else to occupy himself with. Finding an apartment? Investigating his loans? All possible because he only went up to a podium twelve times a week to deliver a lesson plan that took at most three hours every time to create.

But then again, he was also just starting to pay less attention to that life.

His erhu lessons had been on hold for many weeks, and his Chinese had largely stopped improving. He had not run for a few days and the book he had always intended to finish writing had been unsuccessfully terminated three times already. Now and then he would read some primer points about musical synthesis out of a tutorial book he had had to go to Malaysia to find, but mostly only while he was waiting for the food to arrive at his preferred Japanese-style restaurant in the mall nearby his school.

His mind was on other things.

In a brief moment while wandering though the slides of a mandatory loan entrance counseling session online, he remembered that he had a blog that he hadn’t regularly updated for a while. Why was that? It used to be that upon a new experience here, the impressions would burn in his head and demand to be written down into some kind of significant coherence. That happened less and less, he found. At a certain point this year, we all stopped traveling and just started living here. Maybe he should have made more Chinese friends, or stuck to one goal and seen it through instead of splitting his time and pursuing many projects half-assedly. Mom always told me to just do one thing and do it well. Well, at least I found the wisdom of that advice here, and not in school.

In a month he would be 23 years old. Christ. 23? What happened to being 22? He had figured that when this point came he would be a little disoriented by the lost year, even though it was a gap he had intentionally created and planned for. Had it been worth it? Could he play the erhu, did he have a book to show for his time, was his Chinese any better? Well…a little, a few chapters, and kind of. But what about the other, bigger questions that he thought he came to China to uncover? Of self-identity and perspective, of cultural exchange and heritage appreciation? Had he accomplished what he had sought in those?

Had he at least figured out what his questions had been in the first place?

He liked to think that he had, even if an easy summary wasn’t on the tip of his tongue right now. His detailed, if infrequent, blog essays had delved into these investigations in a way he couldn’t easily reproduce pithily. All right. Academic approaches aside, how did he feel? In touch with being Chinese yet?

Yeah, actually. In a strange way, the more he experienced all the fallacies and inconsistencies associated with that notion, the more comfortable he felt with it. And the more comfortable he was with it, the better he could appreciate his community, both Asian American and diverse American at home and abroad, in a more reflexive way, in his gut. He knew it wouldn’t get knotted up by small slights and would stay steady when he did have something to stand up to. Because he knew what it was he was standing on, now. He owned that piece of himself. He knew by the piece’s peace.

And that, he supposed, made it all worth it.

Maybe I’ll go to the Shen Da Chinese Corner sessions these last two months. Why the hell not? Eh. He shook his head and went back to the loan page.

His unfinished novel sat behind the screen.

His future classmates slept.

A life in three parts.

holiday questions

Andrew Pouw — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:38:22 +0000

I’m sitting in a Starbucks – the one at the Coastal City megamall complex a few blocks north of my school. I took the bus to get here thinking that I needed to restock on frozen dumplings and could also use another space heater since it’s getting a little chilly again. But I guess I also just wanted to get out and move around a bit.

For that reason I feel a little silly every time I wind up in one of these Starbucks cafes. It’s guaranteed wifi for my itouch, but still – sometimes I wonder, what am I doing, why did I come thousands of miles to sit in a Starbucks when I am practically from Seattle (close enough)?

It looks like home and feels like home and tastes like home, but it doesn’t sound like home. The ever so slight dissimilarity might be what is getting under my skin.

That or the red holiday cups. Yen asked me if I was going to be lonely over Christmas. I replied that I didn’t feel like it yet since it didn’t FEEL like Christmas – having warm weather unchanged since October, coworkers that don’t mention it and not yearning for a cathartic break after an apocalyptic finals season; these things made me forget that it is already December and that I’ve been in China for more than four months now.

But a gust of cold wind and the darkly sweet taste of a grande toffee nut latte both sink into my bones like home, like reminders that shimmer imperfectly against the traffic fumes along the bus stop and the glittering neon of Chinese mall advertisements, like the Chinese that I hear in the air always flickering in and out of the borders of my understanding, with differences ever so discreet and mild but still like the whispers of a simulacra telling me that I’m not quite in the right place after all.

Hum. ‘Darkly sweet’ is kind of a poor descriptor there. A lightning bug compared to the right evocative word (although I’m aware that the consumer charm of the words ‘toffee nut latte’ kind of spoil the effect from the start). Something to work on, I suppose.