My cousin has yet again come to the rescue by picking up the ball, while I am trying to take a break from the reality of things by taking a “Shanghai Left” and taking a moment off the beaten path.
Unfortunately, the simple truth of reality is that it knows no timezone, has no need for visas, and will always find a means to stowaway in your carry-on, always one layer closer to you than your own skin.
In my downtime—my moment of reflection—I was hit with my first bout of food poisoning ever. It was all-encompassing, controllable to a point, but persistent in that this microbe of an organism smaller than a pinhead took down 190 pounds of mostly-healthy human being. It forced me into a labored battle to keep what was inside from coming out until I was in place that I could do so in some sort of respectable isolation away from complete strangers, in which my dignity and pride could be maintained.
A few things came to mind when I first realized something was wrong. Initially, it was that all-encompassing “feeling” that something was afoot. I literally could feel that “something was rotten in Denmark.” You immediately try to determine what it was that created this feeling. As if it it had any bearing at this point or could change any outcome whatsoever—what was to come was going to come, and there was a complete lack of control to do anything about it.
Then the violent eruption… thank god it was in the confines of a top notch hotel, but my insides literally turned outsides. My entire face the fire exit.
The moments following were zen-like. This is over. And the pain sustained were worth the effort exuded. While completely exhausted, there was a sense of relief and a glimpse that things would be okay again.
A cruel lie, merely a precursor.
What’s more, it took its sweet time in doing so, providing you just enough time to feel as if you are ready to venture forth back into the foreign land.
As we entered the first exhibit at the Massacre of Nanjing, an extremely important piece of Chinese culture, my entire body revolted, and the only thing I could do was head towards the nearest exit. The exit, blocked by thousands of Chinese tourists and about a 1/4 mile of IKEA-like routing, forcing me to experience the extermination of more than 300,000 civilians and combatants alike in “faster”-forward.
Internally, I could feel what was in the pit of my stomach trying to find a means of egress by either the north or south exit, and my inherent willing that neither of those options be used in my current environment.
I made it to the exit and found steps that would take me out but was too weak to climb them as it took every ounce of energy to get where I was. My every joint ached and burned as if I had advance rheumatoid arthritis. I waited in hopes that somebody would come to my rescue. But in recognizing the distance I had traveled and my less-than-kindergarten understanding of Mandarin, I was completely and utterly alone.
I walked up the steps and found air at the expense of warmth. My entire core temp dropped to what felt as if my entire blood stream was coursing with ice water. I just wanted to lie down. I just wanted to have my hotel room back. I wanted a bed and complete darkness. I wanted anything but a wooden bench in thirty-degree weather at a memorial for a Chinese holocaust surrounded by gawking Chinese people whose first inclination would be akin to mine after being indoors through such a display of atrocity. A quick smoke before we move on, shall we. The whiff of smoke from the unknown, sitting next to the white guy curled up in some sort of meditative Indian-style zen pose. My stomach heaved, I vowed to never smoke again if this would just all abate immediately.
Time slowed. I knew the taxi driver was coming at 4:45—it was 3:50.
Seconds were hours, minutes were days. Freezing cold, yet sweating. Why didn’t I wear thermals? What possibly are my options? There’s nothing in my stomach, but I want so badly to puke. I know I’ll just go into a violent session of diaphragmatic convulsions, sapping the last bit of energy that I am barely containing.
I want nothing more at this point than my mom to be there. She would know what to do.
The cab comes, and we proceed on this death-march-like ride to the train station. I am fantasizing about being “Patient 1” of some unknown contagion about to be taken to a centralized mass-transit hub, at which point I become the dirty bomb of pandemic proportion taking out a billion-plus peoples. I glance out the window from time to time to see the blurring communist-era buildings dazzle by. Only one eye open at a time as the full spectrum causes waves of nausea.
I am fetal in the front seat of the Volkswagen taxi. This is the intro to a horrible movie in the making as we arrive at the train station.
I pour out of the front seat onto the sidewalk. Spinning. A lady with a stump for an arm and tattered clothes is pandering me for change. I feel as if my body is barely over 32 degrees. We make our way inside, which is relative since it is arguable as to whether the inside or outside has the higher temp.
This expansive system in normal times would have captivated my attention for architecture. I am merely looking to position myself between something I can lie, sit, slump upon and its proximity to a restroom.
My entire body convulses. Not one of those “falling in your sleep that you wake up” type of things, but literally my entire muscular system contracts simultaneously. I think to myself, “This is what a defibrillator would feel like if used on a living body.” This happens four or five times. I know my body is basically jolting my system forward to the nearest seat. I need warmth, I need immobilization in order to control the orifices that matter most from getting stuck in the open position.
Jon warns me that the bathrooms are not likely to provide the relief I may, in fact, need—something about a two-foot high divider and a hole in the ground. I know as a last resort I would need two handles and at least two horizontally opposed waste gates. My dignity is on the line.
I find the seat and go into the statuesque pose I found provided what, if anything, could be called a small amount of comfort. I call it “Crouching Donkey, Hidden Fetal.” We are over an hour from boarding.
There is only one place to go from here: the place where I was trying to get away from. The only thing working is my mind. I am definitely feverish. I am somewhere between hallucinating and REM. The thought pattern is on repeat. I am going to die here, I want my mother, I need my brother, I am going to die here. I am finding the more I focus on David, the less I am thinking about my external. Does what I am feeling right now come close to what he was feeling? If this is what he felt like mentally, could I then possibly take my own life? I am going to die here. I am replaying so many moments we spent together in single blasts of enlightenment. Not so much thoughts, but waves of feelings. Like the way a familiar smell can conjure up an entire episode in a single synapse. I wouldn’t be on this trip, I wouldn’t feel this way if you were just alive right now. Now look at me curled up in a Chinese train station, about to be humiliated when I fully shit myself and puke all over the floor for good measure. I joked the night before to Jon and Jess that David would never have forgiven me had I convinced him to come on this trip based on the meal from the night before his conservatism just got the best of my free-spirited sense of adventure. Why did I wear light-colored jeans? Why didn’t I bring more layers? Can I buy a blanket? I’m time-cycling these thoughts and open one eye to peer at my watch, which I intentionally put close by. Four minutes have passed. Roughly an hour to the train, another two hours to the Shanghai train station, and another hour to the safety of Jon and Jess’s apartment.
Impossible. No way I am making it.
Internalize, focus on something else, focus on something more unbearable than what you are dealing with right now. Focus on David. Focus on every minute since January 25th, 1980. Focus on the raisin you gave him as an infant and getting walloped for innocently dropping a raisin into his crying mouth a couple days out of the hospital because you thought he was hungry. Focus on the first bike ride, the first snow fort, the trips to the hospital, the first time we carved pumpkins, the first time I realized you were my immortal sidekick, my invincibility charm. Focus on the hurt… make it hurt more than what I am feeling physically and dive deep into the infinite energy source of the mind. Think about walking into his apartment and finding him semi-conscious on his bed and putting a cold towel on his neck after carrying him to the couch. Think about the way I hugged him and begged with all my heart that he wasn’t going to be taken from me that day. Think about hearing his voice, telling me the towel felt good. Focus on his crawling into my bed as grown men and curling up with him and knowing I was able to be as a big brother should and envelope him in all the love I could only give him and nobody else. Make it hurt more than the aches in my joints from the tiniest bump in the train tracks as we make our way at over 200 km/hr to Shanghai. Focus on the thought that I should have found him in the bathroom, and he would have wanted me to have found him and not just trying to imagine what happened to him as I cleaned up his blood from the porcelain tub floor. Focus on the fight at the hospital at his last release where he begged me not leave him there and that he was ready to come home. Focus on his smile. Focus on the countless pictures we took together and the immense duality of pain and joy it causes every time I see his face in one of these and know exactly the moment in time in which it was taken. Focus on the ridiculousness of the situation in its entirety that he is even gone at all. Wish it away, knowing it is real for this moment—only for this moment to divert the immense pain I am in.
The stomach cramps are tearing my insides apart, as if something evil is living inside and wants out in the most violent of ways.
I sat the next three hours in excruciating mental and physical anguish, trying to create more dire situations than the one I was in. When I awoke the next day, it was in uncomfortable relief. The worst had passed, but the lingering hangover of it all and what it took to get through stuck with me for the next 48 hours.
Reality is a relentless bugger, like whatever the microscopic parasite that entered my digestive system at some point during that trip, and it wasn’t going to stop until I acquiesced and accepted it for what it was. I wanted to get away from all that was happening, and the only way to do so was to embrace it fully.
