The year of 2004-2005

It should be noted, that in this house of light and cooking, below the bright orange- greens of Adelaide's attic, was a rather dark presence. Many characters of the world were sharply faceted- Adelaide had been a behaviorialist her second year of college when she abandoned pre-med to study psychology. She had also seen all of the Star Wars movies. So she knew, on a purely intellectual level, there were a number of Good Reasons that Dana was evil. However, on a Gut Level, she had come to suspect he was simply evil as God's way of testing her to never entirely hate another human being. Adelaide seemed to be losing all her wagers with God.
Dana was racist- both in that he thought that non-white races were primitive, and in that races should not mingle. His lip would curl in contempt when he was around too many black people, and he said the DMV made his skin crawl. He did not know why black people had to "talk that way" or "act that way". He felt even more harshly towards fat people, harboring such contempt that he would ponder aloud how a fat person could loathe themselves so much as to continue in the exercise of living. He would grab Adelaide's tummy and jiggle it, while looking like he might throw up. Dana did not know why everyone was so serious, and people overreacted to his sense of humor.
To make all his many points, his girlfirend had a tight body, firm ass, perky breasts, but she was extremely ugly. Her hair was butchered, her hose hooked like a witches, her jaw dropped and pointy. Dana did not know how his friends snickered behind her back or asked Adelaide many questions as to why, and instead he proudly rotated around with her on his arm. Her body, the most important thing, was cut, and he was a proud white man.

Dana was also an elitist. Though his grades were not good enough for a top ten law school, he had contempt for those not in the most elite acadamies. One of the first things you found out about Dana was that he went to Dartmouth. How he failed from there was anyone's guess. Now he went to a pretty good law school that clung on to the top fifty in the rankings. For nonprofit, international and radical law, it was on eof the top choices. Thus Dana had to closet his neo-conservatism. After a year he had a small select group of balding white cronies who he could make his racist and fatty jokes with, and discuss the atrocities of white women with black dildos.

He had many more friends beyond this, because Dana could ask questions successfully. Although he was not particularly bright and often had to have the answers repeated slowly, he knew how to ask questions that made the target feel important. He immediately honed in on insecurities, and flattered the target accordingly, thus winning trust on vanity. Since he was tall, with big shoulders, blue eyes and brown hair, he was considered by many girls as extremely attractive, and Adelaide discovered that cute white men can really get away with murder. Adelaide, however, from living with him, knew that his nose was also slightly hooked, he lips were thin, his teeth were slightly yellow, he had a tendency to get portly, and he smelled awful most of the time, like a mixture of molding semen and sweat. She winced when he lay on her bed, and would sneak in to turn the fan on his room.

Adelaide, at once point, had spent a lot of time with him. She was pleased to discover in the aftermath that she had never grown close to him.

Monday Evening

Adelaide's head hurts. The vapor of pesto and beans is overwhelming, pounding down the walls, knocking on closed doors. Adelaide climbs the stairs to her attic room slowly- her knees are creaking already from her Sunday long runs, and her low blood pressure makes her dizzy whenever she stands. Her mild hypochondria defeats her youth daily. She opens the small windows one by one and then sits cross-legged on her brightly colored bed, cases spread before her, spilling off her knees and under the sheets.

Adelaide is reviewing a case in Uganda, a case of a woman who fled the continual rape of police officers at routine traffic stops in her small town. She fled to neighbors first, and then into the bush later. When that did not hide her, she fled to Dulles airport to work as a nanny. Her employer, a White House official, kept her wages from her, forced her to work 12 hour days, gave her a corner of the floor to sleep on, and raped her. When the woman finally escaped, she called home in desperation. Her husband had been murdered and her son imprisoned by the very police who missed her regular resistance. As a final gasp, she contacted a human rights group in the District. In the course of collecting information for her asylum plea and subsequent employment, she discovered she had AIDS. From then on, the nanny from Uganda restricted all her efforts to the attempt of suicide, which also proved sadly futile.

Adelaide went to college a pre-med major, with aspirations to become the neuropsychologist who finally solved the mystery of autism. She finished all of the weed out first year courses, completed the rigourous nightly lab rituals. Now she slept with medicine's acceptable sister, law, but she still retained her comforts in those sterile practices. When the word horror seemed cheap or dime stor-ish, when she could feel the blood and the dirt, Adelaide quieted her mind by recalling how to clean the arteries of that poor piglet, how the dye had made the veins hard and discernable, how her fingers softly plowed through that subtaneous fat till it hit those strings of gold, how she would clean the excess tissues away like it was her tongue on chicken wings. How to make the incision slight in the hide of an animal and free a layer of skin, so that she could slide her fingers underneath and rip the rest cleanly. Adelaide did not need to close her eyes for this. She could see it in her mind, the cold, scientific worth of a body, while she read the words before her, the hot, feathery dirt of life, girls being pushed into the red seed of the land by ugly fat men of sixty, feeling the HIV and slow death drain into them, feeling sick in the stomach, the dread of knowing one's imminent demise, daily, daily. A few of the stories wound up in enormous stacks in a woman's attic, a woman who secretly wished she could speed the Uganda nanny some arsenic or bad coke.

Adelaide, despite her valiant reassertion at age twelve, was fastly losing her belief in life as well. God was in the doorway of a very long hall, and she was elbow deep in pig fat.

Tuesday Afternoon

Adelaide is pushed against the window, her entire body indented by the frame ledge, the grime smudging slight fingertraces on the left side of her chin. Her bag is pulled up tightly against her chest, propped up on her knees, also pressed to her chest by the wheelhub directly beneath her. Her soft curves are spilling slightly from the fitted gray skirt, her heathered sweater rises slightly off her rounded hips. Pressed next to the ball of Adelaide is an old, old man, with coarse, folded skin and threadbare trousers. His patched navy blazer is folded softly at the cuffs, and he is holding a rickety cage of two chickens in his lap. Adelaide is the only Western person on the bus, which is currently barreling into traffic at 40 km an hour. In China, one passes to the left, while the oncoming traffic dodges the passing cars. Into the mix of cars and busses streams a slew of professional bicycle riders with great posture and wicker baskets. When it rains, the bike riders are soldiers in plastic, each with their different colored plastic tents which are cut to shield the bike basket without tangling up the gears and wheels. On a dusty warm day like today however, the bicyclers are somewhat boring, intertwining with pedestrians laden with large wicker baskets and fresh produce bending their backs.

Adelaide is responsible for traveling one hour to Kunming's cooperatively owned Wal-Mart to find tuna fish and popcorn. She will then duck into the cornershop, lift the curtain into the back room and peruse the Western movies. She will select two- one comedy and one action, and ask the manager to play it on the DVD tv to make sure the movie plays in English or is subtitled English. She will then pay the 8 RMB for each, have her card stamped, and walk back to the bus stop for her return journey. This means Miles and her will have a lovely weekend in, with some beer and pool across the street from the school they teach at, followed up tunafish and crackers for dinner, and popcorn with movies.

Adelaide has never had a partner really, has never been responsible for someone else's happiness, has never picked out movies knowing whatever she chose would end up being acceptable. Adelaide really misses toasted bread, double old fashioneds slinkily half full of amber, delicious scotch, and nutmeg with cream in her coffee. Its been three whole months, or 92 days exactly.

If this were a man's novel, and thus slightly greater, this would be where the story began, hurtling through brightly colored fabrics and food and dusty homemade brick, Adelaide's frame svelte, her eyes darting, her hands tapping restlessly with Miles next to her. Miles would be musing lightly about Lisa from the Bluebird Cafe, where he had had a quick drink yesterday while Adelaide took snapshots of the city for her murals. Miles would be wondering about Lisa in a way that he would consider separate from Adelaide, a way that was prefectly acceptable given that he was a man in pain. Although he had never been left pregnant or raped by someone he loved, he had had a gilfriend dump him once, and the pain left him a womanizer for all his days. Adelaide would know this, and would spend the better portion of her life, the portion that was not devoted to her silly, childlike indulgences and hobbies, to easing Miles' pain. She would love him unconditionally and tolerate his cheating heart, lying next to him hopefully every night. Every now and then she would cry, dig her nails into her palms, exhale with a muffled shreok. Miles would love her quietly, and sip whiskey at dusk.

Thankfully, this is not that kind of story.

Adelaide is here alone, listeining to Cinerama, and Miles is with Huey. He is lucky he is not with Dollar or Apple or Fabio or any of the random words the Chinese picked up as their Western names. He is also lucky that the Chinese do not seem to mind Westerner's total ineptness at saying Chinese names. So Miles knowingly enjoys his privileges, and Adelaide rides to Kunming, and all of this has already happened.

Friday Morning

Adelaide moves deftly between the tall cupboards, plucking out the few ingredients she can not afford from her housemates' shelves. Although noone is home, she is nervous that someone will take a half day or lunch break and catch her knicking dashes of cayenne and squirts of pesto from their stash. She moves in time to the whorish pop guiltily leaking from the small radio on the counter, humming, singing loudly. Every so often she stops, unwraps a bloc of dark chocolate with almonds, pops it in her mouth, and chews it slowly. Then she spits it into a paper towel, folds it in fourths, and meticulously tosses it in the tall trash can before sweeping to the next cupboard. A large pot of stubbornly bland beans simmers on the oven, light floods the texas tiled counters, and the floor is splattered in odd corners. Adelaide is happy, and she acknowledges it, dismisses it, has another piece of chocolate. If she were dead, as she been pretending for nearly a month, this moment would not be, but could she honestly acknowledge this as the meaning of life, to the detriment of all those well-wrought books and men's heavy ruminations? Surely not even the tall ceilings of the kitchen could not contain such destruction.