Day Twenty-Seven

My thin tank top is drenched in sweat when I wake up.  It normally is.  A small fan next to the bed that clicks as it rotates is the only form of circulation this side of the apartment gets.  I count seconds to the beat. 

It’s raining when I step outside.  Children jumping and splashing in puddles on the sidewalk, girls with soaked dresses and boys shirtless, finally relieving themselves from the wretched heat.  It is still early morning and the puddles are colored from the reflections of the street lights.  I pass a group of red ones, then green.  It’s the first rain in weeks since the streets were stricken with the thick summer heat.  Droplets of sweat form above my brow and lip as I trudge through the slick streets with my holey boots that allow small pellets of rain to wet my socks. It’s that summer kind of rain-short but exquisite, the refreshing kind but it still doesn't stand a chance against the summer heat, so you're skin feels sticky and clean at the same time.      

A few servers are bustling around forking spoons and laying knives square to each other on the tables.  I walk towards the coat rack through the kitchen.  My eyes tear from vinegar and sesame oil.  Tofu is crisping in the fryer while the two chefs argue in Mandarin.  One sous is washing a big pot and checking on is rice cooker every few minutes.  Poorly cooked rice is a sin in Chinese culture.  The other is chopping shallots and herbs, moving quickly, it is hard to keep his hands in clear vision.  

 What day is it? Tuesday?  My first customer will be Chenzo, a sour balding Italian man with thick-rimmed glasses and a gimp leg he supports with a cane.  He comes every Tuesday and Thursday and complains of the food the whole time.  He talks to himself as he waits but sometimes he tells me of his life in Italy.  He says the heat is nothing compared to summers in Italy.  On breaks, we sit outside when he had nothing to do, which was often, our knees buckled side by side and our butts against the wet pavement, him smoking cigarettes and me taking the occasional drag.  All his family is still there.  His house is on a narrow street by a parchment store called Pitti Palace where his family gets the postcards they send him from.  He shows me them, with wrinkled hands and downward eyes.  “It is veird zey sen me pictures to remind me of ze only place I von’t ever forget.  What is all around me vis not home,” he said to me in his broken English.  He tells stories of when he was a boy.  His friends and him would steal gondolas and go down the river to markets and steal meatballs from the back door. Sometimes he said things that stuck me with all throughout the night.  They would creep back into my head as I scraped chicken and broccoli into the trash and then again as I turned off the outside lantern right before leaving.  He gives me things sometimes, pictures of places he’s seen, poems he’s written, chess pieces and jacks he's found thrown in the park, and meaningless knickknacks. As I walk home passing under the streetlights, I examine the book he gave me today, Nadja.  He talks about surrealism paintings that decorate his home in Italy. 

I imagine running away to Italy with Chenzo, getting lost in the winding streets stepping on shadows of chapels and stores.  I reach home and climb the rickety fire escape to the roof and begin paging through Nadja with the light of the moon.  Maybe this is how Chenzo loses himself for a bit.  I need to lose myself. I wake up, my face burning from the sun and my shirt dry and crisp for the first time since summer began in the city.

Day Nineteen

My forehead is beaded with sweat when I finally reach the apartment after the twelve-floor climb.  It hasn’t gotten any easier and whoever said always take the stairs to get in shape is a liar.  Out of frustration and pure exhaustion, I bang my head against the door at the mere thought of entering.  The pain is numbing and sensational.  Harder than I intended but at least it will deaden my senses for a few moments so I can bear to enter this alien place.

Mr. Win is the only one home and is passed out with just a sheet, drool forming a shallow pool below his chin in the dip of the mattress made by the pressure of his mammoth of a middle.  I walk on parts of the hard wood floor that aren’t littered with garbage-mostly empty beer bottles, take out containers, and cigarettes. 

The door creaks open when I enter my area, it doesn’t even classify as a room, but Vincenchi made us all rectangular frames reminiscent of doors in order to keep any of the remaining dignity any of us had left. I tumble onto my mattress, uncovered with a single pillow that’s so worn it’s nearly split in two.  The tiny window above my bureau leaks murky light from a nearby streetlight into the room, polluted with smog and sulfur oxide from the city.  The counterfeit light makes me feel worse as I slug another swig of my Heineken. 

There’s a place hundreds of miles from here, where the sun is so close, that you can’t look up because you’ll be blinded the white.  Real light.  The aureate kind that spangles off the water and burns your skin dry.  The kind that is so hot but so invigorating you couldn't imagine feeling more content. Aphids suck the sap off the veiny green leaves; the water running strong, ignoring the boulders in its path.  The mist cleanses your tainted skin as you float into the Catalina blue of the rapids.  Every entry feels as if you are being reborn into the person you were meant to be.  The blistering light of the sun streaks your skin through the trees.  This is what being alive feels like, you think. 

                                  Out here there is nothing. Out here there is everything. 

I wasn’t always here.  Living in a two-room apartment filled with six, at the dirt end of Chinatown that smells of ferrets.  Between us, there are four different languages spoken-so very few words spoken at all.  The silence is not the tranquil one I’ve once experienced-but is phony and ear shattering.  The light is not the same, even outside.  The street lights, billboards, and buildings don’t radiate my mind like the resplendent light from the stars of the place I once knew.  I am left only to dream.

I drift off to sleep as a familiar light begins to vibrate against my face. A text message from Mr. Yio: "Can you please come in earlier? 9:00 am."  I throw the phone making another tributary in the stream of cracks along the wall.

  

Day One

Day 1: 6:00 pm-2:00am

Around three or four a.m. is when they tell me they normally start cleaning and preparing for the morning.  I envision my mother cackling at the thought of me 'getting ready to serve' the type of people who come to this kind of place for brunch while canoodling with her latest meal ticket in the Caribbean.  Mostly all the customers have left except a fairly drunk woman and an exceptionally drunk man.  I begin sweeping the dining room, brushing white rice and snow peas into the pan mindlessly.  My pores leak soy and my skin is spotted with duck sauce making my fingers stick to one another and every surface I touch.  The lanterns always shed the same shade of dull yellow and you can never really know what time is it. 

            Red silk cloths cover the tables lined one by one like cadets reporting for morning roll.  Water drips from rock to rock into a small pond in the center of the room under the belly of the golden lion statue that is said to bring the restaurant “peace and prosperity.”  Maroon columns decorated with dragons and monkeys hold the water worn ceiling upright.  Thin gold trims trace along the corners of the walls helping to cover the building’s true age.  Each table is dimly lit by a single tea light, just enough to see the movement of hands and the whites of eyes.  Metal lanterns dangle from any open space.  Pictures of plum blossoms and the Great Wall are spread about.  The place looks authentic and phony at the same time.

            Back in the kitchen, a black cat grinds against the oven next to the fryer where extra dumplings are sizzling for the employees who are here late cleaning.  A hair goes in the peanut oil.  Shredded cabbage and daikon litter the tile floor. Whisks and woks pile high in the sink.  Two children chase each other around the kitchen fingering bowls of noodles and slurping sauce straight off spoons.  Blenders, pots, and knives are tossed about and they punch them as they run by making the plastic cutting boards jump and fall onto the floor.  I scrub the stubborn grease stains that are splattered from end to end of the kitchen.  My eyes are caked with crust and under my fingernails are thick strips of a black grainy mixture of soy sauce, dirt, and grease.  My hair smells of chicken feet all the way home. 

I step into the night and the authentic blackness of the sky reveals the real time-four o’clock.  The streets are slick and dark.  The only light comes from a lantern hanging on the overhead of the restaurant. The light guides me the sixteen blocks home, while I contemplate how I will return the lantern to the Yios if I don’t come back tomorrow.