Part III begins mid-pandemic, during one of my worst ever bouts of opioid / benzo withdrawal, then flashes back to the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, which led to me being detained and questioned at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border checkpoint.
Because these sections are excerpted from a novel-length manuscript, the jump-cuts are probably a bit hard to follow. The timeline is: Hong Kong protests (spring to summer 2019); outbreak of pandemic (December 2019); quarantine of my flight to Fuzhou (March 2020); beginning of Part III (September 2021).
Part I is available here, Part II can be found here, and Part IV (Epilogue), which covers the mid to late pandemic, will follow shortly.
Park in Chaoyang District of Beijing during optimistic, pre-pandemic days. At some point, I'll post a photo of the Beijing sky during the annual national government meetings, when the factories in nearby areas shut down and the sky transforms into such a bright, lucid blue that you wouldn't believe that it's the same city and skyline.
An orifice shaped like a cat's pupil has opened in the ceiling above my bed. On either side of the slit, folds of whatever gossamer substance it is composed of accordion outward.
They have the rainbow sheen of mother of pearl, which may be why the gash seems to be breathing.
In, out, in-in-out; in, out, in-in-out. The diaphanous pleats dance as I watch, transfixed.
When Stephen Hawking talked about the fabric of space-time, this is it, I realize: This is what it looks like.
I wonder again if I'm dying.
Perhaps I'm already dead.
At first, I think I see a cobweb threaded through the cataract-like cloudiness at the core of the orifice. Then the threads untangle themselves and begin to squirm outward.
I squint, and in a moment I discern tiny spiders with pearlescent bodies and legs that look like translucent grains of rice. They are crawling out of the hole, streaming outward over the ceiling.
The incision in the ceiling spits out fragments of half a dozen psychiatric textbooks.
Delusional parasitosis: the hallucination of infestation by bugs.
I look down at my arms and legs, expecting to see larvae wriggling their way to the surface of my skin, centipedes and millipedes writhing away underneath.
I'm wearing only my boxer briefs. After months of OG COVID, there are stark, shadowed ridges between my ribs.
Formication, the orifice pronounces - not to be confused with its pleasurable cousin with an "n" - is the delusional perception of insects crawling beneath the skin. It is most often experienced by patients in drug or alcohol withdrawal, and it sometimes leads afflicted individuals to claw or cut themselves open.
I have no such plans. I don't see any bugs beneath my skin, anyway.
A buzzing noise emanates from the orifice-oracle. It's a "G" note, wholesome and major.
I intuit what's coming just before they swarm into sight: Light bees!
My mystical protectors, which had first appeared during my maiden LSD voyage over a decade ago. During that trip, I also beheld technicolor strands of DNA-like Celtic knotwork binding me to my fellow psychonauts.
The light bees choreograph a playful show, creating intricate, sigil-like formations that dissolve the warp-spiders before they can crawl down the walls and over to the bed.
I vomit into the black trash bag waiting next to me on the bed like a body bag. From time to time, I've been holding its cool plastic against my sweaty forehead.
The bag is so full that the liquid inside sloshes back and forth. I stash it on the floor, to the right of the bed, and pull on the white V-neck that I'd taken off earlier, which has slipped down the side of the platform bed.
I have been without oxy for 38 hours; benzos and phenobarbital, almost three days.
It's September of 2021, two whole years into the pandemic and over 18 months after Weston and I were released from our quarantine on the Fujian coast.
Going to the hospital or the international clinics to get pills has been out of the question for months.
The hospitals are denying access to people with life-or-death emergencies. The truth is that the Zero COVID policies are killing many people with much graver ailments than those typically caused by the virus.
Chinese social media presents a panoply of horrifying denial-of-care tales.
In one, a pregnant woman dies during labor after being refused admission to a maternity hospital because she doesn't have a clean COVID test from within 24 hours.
In another case, the phone app used to document COVID testing, which the entire population must now regularly undergo, doesn't load a woman's test results properly, and she loses her twins after being denied admission to the hospital (despite a doctor breaking protocol by leaving the hospital to help her give birth nearby).
A close friend's mother dies of brain cancer because she can't leave her province to travel to the Beijing hospital where there is a doctor who can perform the surgery that will save her life.
Thousands of people die because they cannot obtain refills of medications like insulin, blood-pressure regulators, and other staples.
Outrage is building, but it isn't directed at the government, yet.
From behind their masks, people bicker in elevators and endless COVID testing queues.
Petty arguments escalate; blades made of words are sharpened by stress, by pessimism.
In the public area outside of our apartment building, I witness a gray-haired couple circling each other like boxers, the man swiping at his wife, who holds shopping bags, until a security guard hurries over and inserts himself between them.
Again, for anything other than COVID or life-threatening trauma, the hospital is out. (Selfish of the entire country's medical system not to revolve around my needs, I know).
I've been obtaining oxy and benzos through gray-market avenues: Paying pharmacists and doctors who divert them from hospital supplies or order them from India, the pharmacy for the world's poor.
But the Chinese government is cracking down on prescription drug abuse, and I recently got a phone call from my pharmacist supplier in Guangzhou.
"Bro, I hope you have a valid prescription for those pills I sent you, because the police were here asking about them, and they had the photo from your passport page," he'd warned me.
Like hundreds of millions of other people, I'm now essentially on house arrest under the "two points, one line" quarantine system that restricts movement to one's workplace and one's home (with nary a pitstop permitted in between; our food must be delivered).
Because my classes have long since been moved online, I'm on the "one point, no line" system, also known as solitary confinement, which you might recognize by its other name, torture.
I've come to Beijing by way of a job at a school in Suzhou, outside of Shanghai, because for a time, it was better for foreigners here.
Expats are leaving China in droves - even those who have been here for a decade or more, who have Chinese spouses, properties, children enrolled in public school.
We're making WeChat groups to coordinate flights, apartments in our home countries, work opportunities elsewhere.
There are no special dinners, no airport farewells or last hurrahs out on the town. Chosen family of many years' acquaintance depart frantically, without hugging goodbye.
It's becoming more and more difficult to find flights to the U.S. and many other countries. Moreover, by the time that your flight date arrives, COVID regulations have often changed in source, destination, and / or layover countries, creating "airport purgatory" stories that provide morbid entertainment for expat chat groups.
At one point, I receive an email from the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou listing a final flight from Hong Kong International Airport to Dallas-Fort Worth. The U.S. government strongly recommends that any remaining American citizens depart on this flight, after which Consular services will be limited or suspended altogether.
Even within China, rules about time since most recent COVID test and when you've last passed through an area where COVID has been detected vary based on province and municipality, which hinders ability to travel by train, to stay in hotels, to reach Hong Kong International Airport (which is now possible only via ferry and has other headaches attached, as well).
Foreigners - even those of us who have been in China for a year or more - are scrutinized more closely.
Many of us don't have certain Chinese ID documents that the COVID testing system is designed around, meaning that our info has to be entered manually; there is often human error, and test results vanish into thin, virus-laden air.
It is a catastrophic clusterf*ck.
But none of that big-picture stuff is troubling me at the moment. To paraphrase a quote whose source I've forgotten, the beauty of addiction is that you either have one grievous problem or no problems at all.
Right now, I'm a clear case of the former.
All of my last-ditch tricks have failed me: I can't even hit up the local pharmacy for an OTC anti-motion-sickness formulation that contains 30 milligrams of phenobarbital per pill (plus the belladonna alkaloid hyoscyamine, quite toxic, which is added to prevent abuse - not that that has ever stopped me from popping six or eight of them at once).
I realize three days too late that I'd been taking the potent, long-acting barbiturate so regularly that I've now added barbiturate withdrawal to my woes.
Barbiturates are, the orifice reminds me sadly, one of three classes of substances whose withdrawal syndromes can kill you: Alcohol, benzos, barbs.
An old mnemonic for GABA-A receptor action follows: Ben wants it more often, but Barb likes it to last longer.
The orifice sighs open as though preparing to disgorge timeless wisdom, some truth of my existence that will unravel my mind or maybe even unmake me.
It hesitates, then it slides shut again.
It is an elegant motion, full of duty, consideration, and regret.
I'm convinced that if I could stand on my bed and hoist myself up into the gash, I would transport myself back to that first acid trip in ninth grade.
I'd come down, tell my brother what a terrifying vision of the future I'd just beheld. I'd never touch a drug again.
I'd be a licensed hematologist-oncologist by now. I'd have a handsome husband, an adopted daughter. A comfortable home, proud parents.
I'd be the kind of guy that other people could rely upon.
I'm not sure if it's the withdrawal or my self-disgust that makes me puke now.
As I wait for Wei to arrive with the medicine, I play a twisted game with myself.
What wouldn't I do for opioids and benzos right now?
Would I steal meds from a dying person, make his or her last moments more agonizing? If I did, how much would I bogey? One way or the other, his pain would be over soon.
Sell the prayer card from my grandma's funeral service, which I've carried with me all over the world, one of exactly two possessions that mean anything (everything) to me? Would I get rid of it for a bundle? A bag? Half a bag? A rinse?
F*ck a stranger in front of my fiancé and enjoy the sex more than I do with him?
Make a false accusation of rape against a stranger? Against someone I know?
I have become a substance-seeking slave, a revenant. It's not that I'm diminished; I have been returned.
My soul squirms at the knowledge of what darkness it is capable of.
I still don't see any bugs on or under my skin.
That proves that I'm not hallucinating, which means that the spiders on the ceiling were real, I conclude.
It makes sense.
I've been picking up on something big and unusual these past few weeks.
During conversations with deliverymen when they drop off food, neighbors in line for COVID testing, coworkers during WeChat video conferences, I've heard the phrase "he knows" again and again.
Sometimes it's said to me directly, but more often it's spoken as an aside or directed at someone in the background.
What is it that I know?
When I look out the 14th-floor window to the triplet, megalithic apartment towers across the street, I see in their windows the outlines of 10 or more denizens looking back at me. They shift positions - one brushing her hair, another lifting her cigarette to her lips in profile. They open and close their shades in synchrony.
When I catch a glimpse of myself in a reflective surface like the screen of my powered-down laptop, sometimes it's someone else who stares back at me from there, too.
They're peripheral, fleeting impressions, gone as soon as I focus on them directly.
I don't need the orifice-oracle to tell me that these are prepsychotic symptoms.
Scratch the pre-, I revise.
I keep wondering if I died during one of my overdoses.
I have flashbacks of no fewer than four doctors telling me how lucky I am to be alive. How I have the highest blood level of X substance that they've ever seen in a non-corpse; how I seized for Y minutes straight; how I stopped breathing, and they were sure that I was gone.
The thing is, maybe I really was gone.
Perhaps China is a kind of hell for souls that aren't, at their core, evil, but who have massively, irrevocably fucked up.
It makes sense.
The unbearable heat, the indecipherable language, the jubilant Godlessness.
Maybe the pandemic is happening because I started using again while I was here.
Perhaps I'd been given a second chance when I'd arrived in China. I'd made good on it, at first, stayed away from benzos and opioids for the first year and a half. Had one of the golden times of my life.
But in the end, yet again, I'd thrown it all away without much more thought than I'd put into flushing toilet paper.
Perhaps now my perdition is being ratcheted up a notch, my punishment intensified.
Whatever's going on, I have my ways to endure.
Long before the pandemic, my life had become an apocalypse.
Like Jesse Eisenberg's character in Zombieland, I have my rules for survival:
Rule 1: Cardio (any way you can get it)
Rule 2: Ample hydration, and at least one square meal per day
Rule 3: Stay away from stimulants (Corollary 1: Thou shalt not suffer a tweaker)
Rule 4: Step away from the psychosis
I recite Rule 4 like a mantra.
I know that I'm going crazy.
It makes sense.
***
The orifice gapes in surprise, mortification as my body goes rigid with a sudden surge of voltage.
The devil's choreography commences: I fling my limbs outward and downward, clench my jaw, bellow a single-note bray as air is forced out of my chest.
When I come back to consciousness, how can I be sure that I've had a seizure?
When you fall asleep, whether for a catnap or a 14-hour mini-death, something inside of you is still monitoring, still recording.
It tracks the outside world. The sounds and smells around you find their way into your dreams.
When you wake up, you have a ballpark idea of how long you've been out for.
This isn't like that. I couldn't tell you if I've been out for six minutes or six hours or six days. Truly.
And it's not just that I can't identify the room that I'm in, initially; it's that I don't recognize that it's a room at all. Its geometry is abstract, nonsensical.
The category "room" has not loaded yet, does not exist.
For the past however long, I have simply disappeared.
I've been in the realm of anti-time, where peace treaties conclude wars never fought and teenage lovers who died in prom-night car accidents have big, happy families together.
The second, more obvious clue to my seizure is the blood smeared along the floor of the apartment.
It leads to the front door, where, incredibly, the inner handle has been detached from the rest of the mechanism.
Someone's broken in, I panic for a moment before I realize how absurd a conclusion that is.
I lay back down in case another seizure is coming.
The orifice-oracle is gone, but I don't need it to warn me about status epilepticus, the nonstop seizing that can kill you or worse, leave you a vegetable. My heart is still racing from the seizure, and underneath that, I am terrified by the prospect that I'm about to die.
Fear of death is like this for me: I feel nothing as I push closer and closer and closer.
Finally, I get close enough that I lose control. I might have gone too far; it might really happen.
All of a sudden, that deferred fear comes due - principle, past-due payments, penalties. Plus, extortionate interest.
It is its own kind of virus.
***
One 45-minute eternity later, I pull on gym shorts as Wei arrives.
He has a government job, which permits him some freedom of movement.
Wei has the angular features and anatomy-chart musculature of an anime hero. He even has the spiky black hair on top, too.
The first few times that I met him, his beauty awed me into awkward silence.
Wei scans my face, then his eyes rove around the studio apartment until they spot the trash bag beside the bed.
"My uncle didn't believe that these were for a friend - thought I'd become a drug addict," Wei remarks drily as he hands me the fentanyl patches that his aunt had been prescribed as she lay dying of ovarian cancer last year.
Within the fiercely prideful, face-based Confucian family paradigm, this is a humiliation that will follow Wei for as long as his uncle is alive, I know. Drug addiction is to the Chinese what pedophilia is to Westerners.
Wei is a true friend, almost a brother. I've spent holidays with his family in Harbin.
I am not a true friend; if I were, I wouldn't have asked Wei to do this for me.
There will be time for remorse later, I convince myself. How was I supposed to know that his uncle would react so harshly?
American culture ain't so big on face, and I'm long past the point of hiding my desperation, anyway.
I rip one of the transdermal fent patches open, snip the transparent square in half, and shove a piece of it under my tongue.
"Try to space them out; I can't get any more," Wei reminds me.
He scans my face again. He shakes his head slowly, side to side, a small movement. Before he leaves, he squeezes my shoulder.
Probably because of how brutally competitive Chinese school and work are, Chinese people are friendly but slow to form friendships, in general. In most parts of China, calling someone a friend is significant; there's nothing casual about it.
And once you have made a Chinese friend, he will walk through fire with you.
But whatever sense of responsibility our three years of friendship have instilled in Wei has been discharged.
Suddenly, I'm sure that I won't see him again.
The fent patch still under my tongue, I pace the perimeter of the apartment. I drop for a set of pushups and crunches, but my body is too sore from days of withdrawal.
Fent hits differently than other opioids. It is less euphoric, with a much heavier body load. Ordinarily, I hold it in contempt.
Today, however, as an amount of fentanyl meant to be released gradually, over three days of absorption through the skin, enters my system through my oral mucosa in a matter of 20 minutes, it feels as though my entire body has been put inside one of those lead vests that they make you wear during x-rays.
It is a quantum delight, a molecular massage.
I groan, literally moan with relief as the knots in my muscles melt away, my breathing slows, a great warmth rises within me.
I expect to fall asleep, but without the help of Ben or Barb, I can't.
I find the journal that I've been writing in since my quarantine in Fujian.
It's filled with entries, now, with Celtic patterns winding from page to page - intricate, woven motifs ending in dragons' heads and phoenix wings. There's Chinese calligraphy, too, around which I've sketched custom pictographs to help me remember the meanings of new characters.
I've been worrying the past like an itchy wound. I'm preoccupied with identifying when I really, royally, irreversibly fucked things up for myself.
Has my life been a game of chess that I was doomed to lose from the very first move?
Every time I'm sure that I've seized upon a beginning, start writing from it, I discover another hurt or wrong that came before, contributed.
It disgusts and agitates me, this idea that I can't find a point in my life at which, had I gone in a different direction, things could've turned out alright. It makes me feel more broken than I could ever explain.
What I know with more clarity, though, is when things began to go wrong for me in China.
But I don't feel like writing, now.
Instead, I lay back on the bed, which still stinks of withdrawal, with the full bag of puke next to me on the floor. I should throw it out, I know, but in this moment, it feels like an absurd achievement.
It doesn't take me long.
My breathing slows. My eyes flutter shut.
I allow myself to drift.
The quintessential Hong Kong side street, filled with smells decaying and divine. I don't remember which neighborhood I took this in.
"Mr. Brian, could you come in to see Dr. Liu today?"
It's the international clinic that I get most of my benzos and opioids from.
"My appointment's not 'til tomorrow."
"Dr. Liu wants to see you today. There is some trouble in Hong Kong," Cindy explains. "Dr. Liu is afraid that, if there is a lockdown, he won't be able to come into the office later this week."
Four minutes later, I hop into a Chinese Uber, called a Didi. The service is so efficient that it seems unreal, like the taxis are an extension of myself.
I will never, ever tire of riding through Shenzhen. The city is one enormous, chrome-and-glass cathedral of productivity, prosperity, late-night dreams realized through countless early mornings.
I have a sense about my adopted city that I can't really put words to. It's as though all of the parks and shopping malls, the corporate skyscrapers and towering residential complexes - even the trailer homes for migrant workers and the rectangular, blue-and-white police stations found at orderly intervals - are linked together by some huge, invisible superstructure, an unseen rigging that coordinates the movement of every component of the metropolis into its future.
I gaze out the window, searching for signs that anything is amiss.
It is August of 2019, four months prior to the pandemic, and the pro-democracy protests / riots (depending on who is talking about them) have been going on since early spring.
Decades after the UK relinquished control of what was once the prize jewel of the British colonial diadem, Hong Kong falters in a political liminal zone.
It has its own government; special financial regulations, including its own stock market; and many other privileges not accorded to any other Chinese region.
Originally, Mainland China had signed an agreement with Hong Kong to fully reabsorb it into the rest of the country by 2050.
However, the merger is progressing more quickly than promised and certainly more quickly than the Hong Kongese are comfortable with; they understand the loss of culture, liberty, and diversity entailed by the CCP's assumption of control.
Carrie Lam, Hong Kong's Chief Executive, has seriously underestimated the level of unrest fomented by recent laws allowing extradition of Hong Kongese to the Mainland Chinese judicial system.
Any Hong Kongese citizen who speaks out against the CCP can now be handled by the puppet courts of the Mainland, where a minister once referred to the idea of an independent judiciary as a "Western fallacy."
In the Mainland, political prosecutions have already been used against dissenting government officials, human rights attorneys, and intellectuals, several of whom have reported torture.
One formerly critical blogger is released from incarceration after making an Orwellian pledge "to devote the rest of her life to encouraging the Chinese youth by writing about the Chinese Dream."
A small group of Hong Kongese have decided that this is the moment to press for independence, for democracy.
The rest of China, both Hong Kongese and Mainlanders, as well as most of the rest of Asia, recognize them as insane, but it doesn't prevent them from organizing protests in public parks and on rooftops.
"Five freedoms, and not one less," they chant as they face off against riot police who arrest them in great roundups.
The withdrawal of the extradition bill is one of the five freedoms. The protesters also demand an independent inquiry into the use of force by the police and the release of everyone arrested in the course of the demonstrations. They argue for greater Hong Kongese autonomy.
Amnesty International lends its support, and the protests get ample coverage throughout the Western world, whose governments are eager, as always, to depict the CCP in the worst possible light.
Although Chinese social media contains videos of PLA tanks advancing toward the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border, I don't see any signs of chaos during the 35-minute drive to the clinic.
The face of Shenzhen, like the expressions of its denizens, is placid.
However, most people understand that the riots are a portent, a symptom of a wider disease.
Almost from the time that I arrived in China in 2017, President Xi began instituting measures that reversed decades of economic and social liberalization.
He has violated the two-term limit that had been in place since Chairman Mao infamously botched his political affairs during his geriatric years.
Xi has committed to social conservatism, reduced foreign economic and cultural influence, wealth redistribution.
He is a neo-Maoist, which means that he dwells with fondness upon the days that older Chinese still have nightmares about.
The Chinese people have existed under imperial rule for thousands of years, but this is a lot to swallow, even for them.
The protests in Hong Kong have begun a new scene of the first act of Xi's show; Act Two, it is widely believed, will involve annexation of Taiwan.
As hearty palm trees and endless, perfectly manicured hedges fly by, I consider the prospect of martial law in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
I remember the face but not the name of a middle-aged black woman who I was in rehab with in Florida.
This woman had the voice, manners, and wardrobe of a bank manager.
She was facing 15 years in federal prison for heroin distribution.
"I remember when the plane hit the first tower," she recalled of 9/11. "The first thing I thought was - I gotta get across Brooklyn for a pickup today. How the hell is that gonna happen?"
Cindy, the clinic's receptionist, gives me a friendly wave.
It's an ongoing joke that the clinic is opening a new branch in another district of Shenzhen thanks to my patronage. I sometimes spend upwards of 2K or 3K USD a month on alprazolam, clonazepam, and a Chinese Percocet called Tylox, which is frying my liver.
Most of the patients in the waiting room are diplomatic staff, foreign teachers, businesspeople and their families.
But there are a few who I sniff out as fellow drug seekers, their dilated pupils, familiarity with the clinic's flow, and eagerness to see the doctors giving them away.
Dr. Liu knows which kind of patient I am. He's pissed today.
He's a miniature guy in his mid-30's, but his facial features and expression are distinguished, almost noble. You'd instantly mark him as a lawyer, a doctor, a professor - some sort of high-powered, cerebral consigliere.
Dr. Liu teaches at Hong Kong University Hospital, and, like most of the doctors in these international clinics, he moonlights here for extra income.
"This Tylox dose, frankly, is getting ridiculous," he begins.
I mangled my left arm badly in a drug-fueled car accident years ago. These days, the injury is my golden ticket; my entire elbow has been reconstructed with titanium hardware with prongs like a garden-weeding implement's.
It doesn't trouble me a bit, but it's a reasonable justification for taking opioids.
The surgeon who performed the procedure had given me a helpful heads-up that after a few years, sometimes the hardware has to be removed or repositioned as the body's healing forces it out of place, causing pain.
I mention the pain so often these days that I imagine I can almost feel it, sometimes.
"The pain's been badly, lately," I offer halfheartedly. "I've been typing a lot for work."
"Scale of 10?"
"Maybe 6.5 to 8," I reply.
Don't drug-seek, please.
But if you do, don't ever rate your pain as a 10 / 10. If you ever feel a 10, you won't have the ability to speak.
Honestly, 9 is a little obnoxious, too. It screams, "I know the game well enough not to rate my pain a 10, but I'm a histrionic baby nonetheless."
If I rate my nonexistent and thus unquantifiable pain a 6 or lower, on the other hand, Dr. Liu is liable to recommend a weaker medicine, maybe tramadol or dihydrocodeine.
Six-point-five to 7.5 is a comfortable home range for a guy like me.
Women can get away with higher numbers than men (lesbians lower than straight women; gays higher than straight men).
"I don't think it's just pain that we're dealing with," Dr. Liu says. "Alprazolam doesn't have anything to do with pain, either."
Dr. Liu is a good doctor. He knows the dangers of taking this many benzos and opioids.
I know that he's afraid that I'll die of overdose, and, because I'm a foreigner, there will be an inquiry.
I have a suspicion that Dr. Liu isn't just worried about covering his ass, though. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I admitted what was going on and asked him for help, he'd work with me as I tapered down.
He'd be relieved, protective, perhaps almost fatherly; he wouldn't care about his patient-based commission.
I imagine a version of today's scene in which I agree to taper off of both groups of drugs.
I have a pretty rich inner world, but this one is a stretch even for me.
Next visit, I decide.
If there were a Latin motto for the House of Brian, it would be Cras Semper Reformans, "Always Changing Tomorrow."
Ten minutes later, the in-house pharmacy has my meds ready in this very chic little black-and-gold bag with a Commie-red bow on top.
I recognize the auntie pharmacist, who once confessed to me that she takes Zolpidem (Ambien) for sleep.
These under-the-breath disclosures are one of the things that I appreciate most about the Chinese; it's their way of saying, "I can judge you, but I can't judge you that much."
"You have a red mark next to your name in the pharmacy computer now," she warns me.
"You should give me more then, auntie! They're coming for me."
She smiles despite herself. I picture myself through her eyes.
For a second, my self-loathing lightens.
Victoria Bay, Hong Kong, in blue monochrome (June 2018).
Victoria Bay is a place that has a soul.
On a clear summer day, the sea here looks more like the sky than the sky itself.
It's such a perfect illusion that it makes me wonder whether I've sustained one of those brain injuries where your neural software stops correcting the upside-down version of the world projected onto your retinas, so that you're walking on the ceiling for weeks on end.
Jay and I came here for one of our first overnight dates.
We ate sushi so fresh that it made me feel like a sea creature, rode the giant Ferris Wheel, which boasts one of the most gorgeous vistas that I've experienced anywhere in the world.
Part of the magic of Victoria Bay is its architecture.
It's easy to forget, after a while, but most Chinese cities have virtually no buildings older than 30 or 40 years (at most).
You might come across a small stone temple used for ancestor worship, a pagoda here and there, but in general, you've got to head out into the sticks to see any structure that stood before modern China.
The result is a sort of cultural freefall; the phrase "unmoored in the now" comes to mind.
Without the architectural reminders of history to act on the subconscious, the history itself fades away.
Victoria Bay has grand, stone structures in the Greek and Renaissance Revival styles, the sort favored for American government buildings like capitols and courthouses. They date back to the 1800s, and they were once used for bureaucratic administration and storage of spices, tea, silk, porcelain.
There are hole-in-the-wall dim sum restaurants with songbird-like waitresses in bright, floral-patterned dresses next to American-style burger joints tended by tattooed Canadian biker chicks. There are British-style schools where orderly files of little Chinese kids wearing the distinctive British school uniform, complete with formal shorts, march by.
I crave the rawness, the unrestraint of Mainland China, but Hong Kong has an elegant polish that most of the Mainland lacks. It's top-down British manners fused with high Cantonese culture and the worldly ways of a port that has seen, has been everything.
Its people are cultured, tolerant, proud. Most of all, proud: They know that Hong Kong has an essence that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world.
Victoria Bay is in ruins.
If you told me that there is a civil war going on here, I'd believe you.
On this street, there are as many broken windows as intact ones.
There are chunks of pavement missing, and there is Cantonese graffiti, much of it difficult for me to understand because it is either slang or more similar to traditional Chinese than the simplified Chinese that I've learned in the Mainland.
The fact that I can't understand the graffiti, but that the characters are vaguely familiar, uneases me; they're like sigils from a Lovecraftian dream.
Cops, usually a negligible presence outside of Beijing, are conspicuously present everywhere.
Some have on the heavier gear of riot police; a few are wearing camouflaged combat fatigues.
When I was younger and I acquired a new, prized possession, invariably a book, it would ruin my day, just completely collapse me, when it sustained its first folded page, its first finger-smudge.
I feel that way about Victoria Bay, now. Like it was a perfect thing that belonged to all of us, and now it's tainted, ruined.
There are few other people walking the streets. The ones I do see move purposefully, businesslike.
I try to picture myself through their eyes.
I'm out-of-place in this National Geographic cover shot.
I'm a waiguoren, a white ghost; I probably wouldn't even show up on film.
I don't linger in Victoria Bay.
No one would be in Hong Kong by choice today, with the riots and police roundups still popping up unpredictably, like herpes outbreaks.
At the moment, I'm on a business visa, which means that I have greater freedom than someone on a work visa, but it also means that I need to leave Mainland China every 60 days.
Hong Kong and Macao qualify as outside the Mainland for visa purposes, so once every two months, I make a token trip to Hong Kong.
Under normal circumstances, it's a reason to explore, perhaps to engage in a little medical tourism.
Under these conditions, it's a liability.
Things are especially tense for foreigners these days, with rumors of Western governments funding and stoking the protests in Hong Kong. (In case you're not familiar with the playbook, this is the CCP's go-to explanation for any unrest in China, which could never, of course, originate with its own people).
I'd intended to make my visa run earlier in the week, but on Monday and Tuesday nights, I'd worked until midnight. On Wednesday night, I passed out in an unfortunate position after too many pills and too much red wine; I'd cut off circulation and woken up with a right arm that wouldn't work for eight hours.
Today, Jay had offered to come with me to the Luohu border checkpoint and wait while I crossed over.
I check my watch as I reach the metro station. I've been gone just over 80 minutes.
As I wait for the train to arrive at the sparsely populated outdoor platform, I notice a thin, weaselly man hurry through the doors that open onto the platform.
His expression is panicked, his thin face a study in smudged charcoal.
As he hustles along the platform, he looks over his shoulder. I trace his gaze as the two most physically intimidating Asian men that I've ever seen emerge through the doorway.
The thin man, moving frenetically, trips as he turns his head to face forward again.
He stumbles forward, catches himself on the heels of his hands.
He flips over onto his back, then lifts himself up on his hands and feet, scrabbling backward on all fours while facing up as the pair of men pursue him.
My first thought from their physiques and the way that they carry themselves is that they are police chasing a protester.
They're wearing short sleeves, though, and I notice that both have ornate tattoos along their upper and lower arms. The man on the right has green and black ribbons that slither from his bulging biceps down around his forearm.
These men are not cops.
There is something menacing about them; they are thugs of a sort that I've never seen in China.
The man who is trying to get away takes advantage of another passenger opening the second set of glass doors on the far side of the platform; he stands, still facing backward, toward the two men, and skitters through.
The big guys follow him through the doors after what feels like only a second or two but must be longer.
They don't run, but their strides are powerful, purposeful.
I don't realize what I've just seen until three weeks later, when I read a Hong Kongese blog published anonymously by one of the groups of protesters.
It alleges that the Mainland government has contracted with the Triads, the notorious, highly-organized crime gangs of Hong Kong and Guangzhou, to do their dirty, violent work in intimidating the protesters.
As with most Asian gangs, a sophisticated language of ink communicates individual identity and group affiliation.
I try to find information about the tattoos favored by different Triad organizations, but I come up dry.
Nevertheless, I'm almost certain that what I saw that day was two Triad gangsters going after a protester.
Again, there is something that stays with me about the scene, a déjà vu suggesting that I'd dreamt it before I watched it happen.
The same feeling creeps up on me when the pandemic finally arrives in December; it is expected, a garbled prophecy fulfilled, almost a relief.
***
The line at the Luohu customs checkpoint is much shorter than usual.
It's around 6:30 p.m., when Mainland commuters are returning home for dinner and students from HKU and several other Hong Kongese universities are heading into Shenzhen and Guangzhou for some Friday-night fun.
I message Jay to let him know that I'm crossing back over.
In three or four minutes, I've reached the window, where a fresh-faced customs agent scans my passport.
I know that it must look odd, a foreigner crossing over for an hour or so every few weeks, but I remind myself that I could've been in Hong Kong for any number of legitimate scholastic, business, or adulterous purposes.
It happens quickly.
The agent types something into his computer, reads the screen, and picks up his phone. He says something short, which I don't understand, in a discrete tone.
Maybe 45 seconds later, a late middle-aged man with a supervisory air arrives.
He speaks to the agent behind the counter, who translates for him.
"Go with him, please, sir."
The supervisor leads me to an elevator, where we go down rather than up.
I count the floors: Sub-one, sub-two, mind blank like it's a meditation exercise.
At this point, I have a strange Bell Jar moment.
As the elevator descends, I'm conscious of my life as a funnel.
It starts out wide open, full of every possibility, and then narrows ineluctably until I am spit out at this moment - the singular, inescapable present.
The elevator opens onto a nondescript hallway with doors along one side.
They could lead to anything - bureaucratic offices, medical examination rooms, torture chambers.
***
At this point, Dear Reader, I wouldn't blame you if you've questioned whether I'm always a reliable narrator.
In fact, God bless you, you sweet summer child, if you haven't.
But if you believe only one part of this whole saga, let it be this passage that follows, please.
Some of the doors along the left wall are open.
I can see tight, fluorescently lit rooms with small tables and generic office chairs crammed into them.
They contain no desks, no whiteboards, no office supplies or personal effects.
Two people could occupy a single room cozily, three would be a crowd, and four would necessitate a game of Twister.
These rooms bear an uncanny resemblance to the ones where suspects are questioned in American police stations.
The man leading me down the hall, who walks beside and half a step behind me, ignores the empty rooms.
We pass one room, then a second. He guides me into the third room, which is configured differently, I notice at once. It is empty save for a low bench that is attached to the back wall.
I sh*t you not: The entire room is covered in blue-green, felt-like padding.
Bench, walls. That's it, actually - no chairs or table here.
The supervisor speaks to me in Mandarin that is hard for me to understand, but I get that he's mentioning my cell phone.
I take it out and hand it to him, but he simply places it on the bench, three feet to the right of where I've taken a seat. He makes a hand motion to convey that I'm not supposed to use it.
He asks for my passport, the only word that he says in English, and leaves the room with it.
The door, whose interior surface is also covered in padding, remains open.
For now.
Thank you for reading! Part IV (Epilogue), which covers the mid to late pandemic, will follow soon.
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