After The Flood

I rolled my pantlegs back down on my way up the stairs. One of my students darted past and bid me HAH-LOO. I waved. I felt around in my pocket to see how many cigarettes I had left. Not enough. Never enough. I kicked open the wrought iron security gate with graceless ease. And there on the second floor of the Laowai Projects, I found Jacob, Andrew, and Micah sitting out in the hallway with their laptops, well, atop their laps, as it were.

"Dude. Dudes," I said, "y'all should come check it out. The campus is flooding."

No reply.

"I mean, the water is climbing the stairway to campus. It was almost to the top, last I checked."

Jacob laughed into his monitor and slapped his thigh. Micah grumbled to himself. Moose belched, then lifted up his laptop to scratch his junk.

"Guys, I don't know how to tell you this," I said, biting my lower lip, "but I'm thinking about getting a sex change."

Nothing. I shrugged and lit a cigarette. I walked down to the end of the hall and blew my exhaust out the window. Then I snubbed the cigarette on the windowsill and flicked it over the edge. And then I walked back down the hall and stood there watching the three of them watch whatever they were watching.

"What the hell is this?" I asked. "A fucking teleconference?"
"Naw, man," said Jacob. "The hallway's the only place we can get internet."
"Oh. That's cool. Hey. Look. I gotta take a piss. But in the meantime, the campus is flooding, dude." I tipped my hat. "Dudes."

I stepped over the three of them one leg at a time, found my door, and pressed my keycard against the lock. Nothing happened.

"Fuck," I said. "My keycard's broken."
"Naw, man," said Jacob. "They all broken. You gotta get the Missus to let you in."
"The Missus?"
"Yeah. She's in there."
He gestured towards a half-open door at the end of the hall.
"Yo, Keith. Before you go in," said Moose, "would or wouldn't?"
"Would or wouldn't what?"
He nodded towards the Missus' door and raised his eyebrows.
"Oh. That," I sighed. "Well, how the hell would I know? I haven't even seen the Missus yet."

I found the Missus cross-stitching in her office. Or her apartment. Or whatever it was. I cleared my throat. She looked up. I looked down. Then I looked back up. And I blushed a bit. True. The Missus was not exactly an eyestrain.

"Qingwen," I said. Excuse me, I said.

But she already knew what I wanted. She swept a jangle of keys off the table and followed me to my room.

"Xie xie," I said as the door scrolled open. Thank you. And I bowed, however slightly.
"Bu yong xie," she said. You're welcome.

I smiled. The Missus didn't smile back. But she did give me a look. Or was it a look? Yes, I decided, it was a definite look. A sultry look. Or was it really all that sultry of a look? Yes, I decided, it was definitely a sultry kind of look. Or was it? Then the Missus turned away without a word and jangled off down the hallway while I stood there wondering.

My room was bare and dark and unusually clean. For lack of a filth to wallow in, I returned to the teleconference in the hallway.

"You guys work for Google or something?"
"You never answered me," said Moose. "Would or wouldn't?"
"That's a complicated question," I said, gazing towards the Missus' room.
"What's so complicated about it?"
"The question."

Moose was watching Youtube footage of a turtle humping a rock. Jacob was watching the Thrilla in Manilla. Team Leader Micah was lesson planning for tomorrow.

Moose giggled girlishly.

Micah groaned.

Jacob cackled and stomped his feet.

"Damn! Goddamn! Get it, Clay! Get it!" he shouted at the screen. "Goddamn, Muhammad!"

A bell rang. End of Round Six.

"Hey yo, Keith - beer run!"
"What? Dude, I went on three beer runs last night."
"You were late. Dude."
"I know I was late," I said, "but it wasn't even my fault this time."
"This time is right."

I half-sighed, half-grumbled.

"Man, no more beer runs for me. I'm done," I said. "I think I pulled a bicep last night. I'm not lugging another 16-pack of shitty Snow all the way across town for you inglourious basterds."
"I think I pulled a bicep last night," whined Jacob, throwing his voice up a few octaves.
"Fuck off. And anyway, I'm broke."
"Bitch, I'm broke," rapped Moose.
Then he balled his fist and beatboxed, poorly.

He was referencing an obscure Cody ChesnuTT track by the name of "Bitch, I'm Broke" - an absurd, obscene, charmingly lo-fi, delightfully lowbrow hip-hop jam that that only Moose and I and maybe four other people in the entire world knew about at the time, a jam that the other seven volunteers would come to know and hate altogether too well before the end of the two-week Dazhou Experiment.

"Hey, where's Katie?" asked Moose, after a beat. "She'd probably go get us some pijius."
"I haven't seen her since lunch," said Micah. "At the cafeteria. I mean, the canteen."
"Yeah, where she at?" asked Jacob. "That girl owes me Oreos."
"Oreos?"
"Yeah. Told her to go to Wal-Mart and get me some Oreos."

Then the power went out.

"Fuck!" said Moose.
"Shit!" said Jacob.
Micah shrugged and resumed typing.

The hallway was dark. Moose's turtles were frozen in mid-hump. Muhammad Ali was suspended in mid-punch like a pinned-down butterfly.

"Told you," I said. "The campus is flooding. It's the end of days. The Rapture, and what have you. Moose - beer run!"

Moose paid and I carried. In the meantime, Micah, as Team Leader, ran down to the store and bought nine flashlights and a shit ton of candles. We set up shop in Moose's room. Twenty-four hours into the Dazhou Experiment and the dude's clothes were already strewn all over the floor. But the candles lent the place a kind of churchy ambiance. A Catholic grotto mystique. Everything reeked of feet and booze. But it was an awfully romantic venue nonetheless. With the candles and what not.

While the rest of us shot the bullshit, Moose lay there in bed in front of his laptop. Gunshots rang out and police sirens wailed from across the room.

"Yo, Keith. You ever played this?" Moose asked.
"What is it?" I asked, peering over his shoulder. "Grand Theft Auto?"
"Naw, man."
"Jesus," I said. "Is that who I think it is? The guy in the car?"
"Yeah. Probably."
"No. Wait. Wait," I stammered. "Wait. You're telling me that's _____?"
"Yeah."
"And you're shooting him."
"I guess so. If you want to put it that way."
"There's no way to put it," I said.
"That's just how it is," followed Jacob.
And Jacob and I fist-pounded, having tag-team quoted the one movie we can both agree on. But nobody noticed. They just thought we were weird.

"Where the hell did you get this?" I asked.
"The internet," said Moose. "You can find it online. But that's the only place you can get it. The company went out of business a while ago. For some reason the game didn't - fuck!"
"What?"
"I just shot ______ in the crotch, but I didn't finish him. Goddammit. That goldbricking sonofabitch."
"Jesus," said Jacob.
"Christ," I said.

The door creaked open and Kevin, my handler, peeked his normal-sized head into the room.

"Keith," he said, all wispy-like. "Keith."
"What's up?"
"What are you doing right now?"
"I can't tell you what I'm doing right now," I said. "I am currently an accomplice to a historical tragedy that I want no part in."
"Let me see," he said, and wrapped his arm around my shoulder.

"Booyah!"
"Jesus Christ, Moose," said Jacob. "You are a depraved human being, you know that?"
"Who is he? The man with the head blood?" asked Kevin. "Is he Jesus Christ?"
"Far from it," I said. "That's _____. Moose just assassinated him."
"Ass-ass ate him?"
"More or less."
"Who is _____?" asked Kevin.
"He was a great man," said Jacob, "until Moose ass-ass ate him."
"Plus four bodyguards," said Moose, "plus the driver. 750 points total. Like I said: booyah."
"You are shooting him? For pleasure?" asked Kevin.
"Don't look at me," I said. "Moose is the lone gunman here. It's his game. I'm just watching it."

Round after round, replay after replay, Kevin stared at the screen until I could see the ocular fluid glazing his eyes like a pair of glutinous rice balls. Then he embraced me, stood up and left.

The rest of the volunteers trickled in eventually. They came bringing frankincense and beer. And it was good. We bullshat by candlelight. The night progressed. Then it digressed. Then it regressed, as nights are so wont to do.

"What the hell is wrong with you? It's a Terrible. Fucking. Movie!"
"But you just admitted that it was a great performance," I countered.
"I never said that."
"You just did! Thirty seconds ago!"
"Actually, I don't usually agree with Keith," said Moose, "but Jacob, you did say that it was a great performance. In a terrible fucking movie."
"Okay, so what? Maybe it was a great performance. From a fucking psychopath. Who actually believed that he was an oil tycoon from the 1900's. A great performance, maybe. But that doesn't un-make it a terrible fucking movie."
"Look, man," I said, "I watched it again the other day and - "
"You been watchin' it six times a day ever since I gave you the DVD! Which you never returned, by the way."
"That's not true. I only watched it six times a day when you first gave it to me. I've been cutting back - "
"And when you gonna give it back?"
"Why do you even want it back? I thought it was a terrible fucking movie."
"It is a terrible fucking movie! My God, it's the worst movie ever made. But it's still my property. I bought it. For twenty dollars. In America. The light of the world."
"I'll give it back. I promise. Once I'm done with it."
"Yeah. Done jerking off to it six times a day."

An "ooh" from the crowd. I rolled my eyes.

"Anyway," I said, "I watched it a couple nights ago. For the first time since January, I'll have you know. And I realized something. For a long time, I thought about the film in terms of Capitalism vs. Christianity. But then, the last time I watched it, I realized that I was looking at everything the wrong way. The film is actually about - "
"Yo, where's Katie?" asked Moose.
"Last I heard, she was going to Wal-Mart," said Jeesun.
"Yeah. Girl owes me Oreos," muttered Jacob.
"Oreos?"
"Yeah. Oreos. What? You don't know what Oreos are? Girl, you call yourself an American? Fuckin' Oreos. Damn."

A tense silence. Then Jacob started giggling.

"Right," said Team Leader Micah. "I'm gonna see if I can get a hold of Katie."
He called. No answer.
He called again. Still no answer.
"Weird," he said, and put his Team Leader cellphone back in his Team Leader pocket.

A few minutes later, the IT Guy sent me, of all people, a message telling us that we were, under no circumstances, to leave the dorm that night.

"Water is everywhere," he wrote.
"And not a drop to drink," I said to myself.
"What? Who the hell are you talking to, man?" asked Jacob.
"Nobody. Hey. The handlers say we're not supposed to leave the dorm tonight."
"Cool. We still got time for one more beer run though, right?"
I said nothing.
"Hey yo! Moose!"

Moose bought and I carried. It was like the Day of the Dead outside. A morbidly festive occasion. The weirdly dark streets were crammed with people holding candles. One end of the main drag was cordoned off and sandbagged, and a crowd had gathered there. The Chinese riffraff wandered about, carrying candles in their palms, gawping at the raging river, chattering about the flood, smoking, hawking loogeys. Street vendors were hawking candles for five kuai a pop. Candles. Get yer candles. A good day for the candle men. I lit a cigarette and instinctively offered one to Moose. He took it.

"... the hell? You smoke?"
"Yeah," said Moose. He produced his own lighter. "Fuck it, man. It's China."

The flickering candlelight lit our way to the Gettin' Place.

"It is apocalypse season," I said to Moose. "Maybe we should stock up on bottled water and ramen noodles. And firearms, while we're at it."
"I know, right?"
We bought beer.
In the dark, I stumbled over an embankment and the bottles clattered in their case. Then I stumbled over an abutment and regained my footing.
"Panda, if you drop my fucking beer, you're not even gonna live to see the apocalypse."

When we got back to Moose's room, the freeloaders snatched up our beers, but we managed to sneak a couple for ourselves. I sat down next to Jacob. And the night progressed. And digressed. And regressed.

"What is wrong with you? You're saying that hearing and sight are the same fucking thing? You're saying that ears and eyes are the same fucking organs?"
"They're not," I said. "I'm just saying that the way a bat perceives reality, well, I don't know. Because I'm not a bat. I'm just saying that bats probably see sounds and hear sights, so to speak. I don't think the organs involved really matter. Sound and vision come from the same waves at different wavelengths, so whether it's eyes or ears, it doesn't really matter. It's not about the senses, or the wavelengths. It's about perception - "
"But sound waves and light waves are different," said Moose.
"Are they?" I asked.
"They are."
"Two completely fucking different things," agreed Jacob.
"I didn't know that. I'll have to look it up. I don't know shit about science. I'm kind of a hack," I said.
"Yes," said Jacob. "You are."

"Mind if I smoke up in here?" I asked Moose.
"As long as you don't ash on my floor."
"I won't. I promise." I lit up. I coughed. Ash flew everywhere. Moose glowered. "My bad. But look. Anyway. What I'm saying is this: when a bat processes sounds, it can't possibly be hearing them the way we hear sounds. Bats fly around in dark caves for a living. And they fly really fucking fast. They find shit to eat in the dark. They find mates in the dark. They get it on with she-bats. In the dark. So they can't be hearing in the same way we do. Bats must have evolved the ability to form mental pictures very similar to the ones we see when we see things, only they use sound waves to form those pictures. Otherwise they couldn't - "
"Pictures? Pictures? But pictures are sight, man! You can't hear pictures! You're contradicting yourself! What is wrong with you?"
"I mean mental pictures, dude. Images. Like when you listen to a baseball game on the radio. Or when you're reading a book. You can't see the players, you can't see the story, but you form a - "
"Hey yo," said Moose, "where's Katie?"
"Lemme call her again," said Micah, who had been watching our conversation the same way you watch your dog lift its leg on a lamppost when you're taking it out for a late night walk.

The bat debate raged. The night regressed. Nobody had an opener, so Moose uncapped everyone's bottles with the butt-end of a lighter, a skill I admire but have yet to master. And then Micah started jumping up and down and shooshing us. He had found Katie. In the sudden silence, the digitized sound of a weeping female was audible.

"You're where? ... Where? Okay. So you're okay. You're at a hotel. ... A nice hotel. ... With room service. Sweet. ... Are you okay? ... Good. Good. That's good. ... You what? ... You what? ... You wanted to swim across? The river. Jesus. You would've died, Katie. I mean, I've seen the river. You wouldn't have made it. ... No. No, you wouldn't have. ... I know you're a good swimmer. ... Look, class is important. But it's not that important. ... No, it's okay. No need to apologize. ... Okay. As long as you're okay. We'll see you tomorrow, alright? ... Okay. Okay. Hang in there. And don't worry about the - "

"Ooh," said Jacob, and he was so excited that he actually raised his hand. "What about the Oreos?"

Despite ourselves, we laughed. And laughed hard.

"Oh. ... Nothing. Jacob's just being ... Jacob. Yeah. Sleep tight."

Micah hung up. We giggled.

"You assholes," said Micah.

And we giggled some more.

We went to sleep at 27 AM and woke up the next morning at seven. Baggy-eyed and foul-breathed, I donned my glasses, brushed my teeth, and sucked down a pitcher of Moose's coffee. Katie had returned. The school had trucked her in from the other side of the river. She had teachers to teach, after all. The show must go on, after all.

I went outside to patrol the riverside promenade. There were no crowds. The sidewalk was a bit damp, but the campus had not flooded as prophesied. Students were flocking to class. I had to teach in ten minutes. Business as usual. The show would go on. The Rapture had not come, not just yet. The waters had risen, had left their filthy mark on the sodden grass of the floodplain, and then they had receded, overnight. The waters had returned to the river, where they belonged. I lit a cigarette. Beneath me I saw an innocent brown stream murmuring slowly past, a stream that rippled and waved but had not even the slightest intentions of overflowing its banks. A well-behaved, obedient river. Yes, sir. No, ma'am. Domesticated. Tranquilized. Etherized. Nature. Good nature. Good, good nature.

I taught my classes. I did my job. Then I skipped lunch and went back to my room for a three-hour nap. After that, I caught a cab downtown and took a walk along the other side of the river.

"See those restaurants?" an old fart peasant said to me. He pointed with his pipe to a row of hot pot joints nestled against the neck of the levee. "All of them were flooded last night. You can see it. Nothing left inside. All gone."
"And the bridge?" I asked.
"The bridge flooded, too. Couldn't cross it. The cabbies would tell you, 'No way.' Then they'd take you to an expensive hotel on the other side of the river. That's just what I heard. And that was last night, of course. Not a problem anymore."

It was hard to believe. The bridge arched a good fifty feet above the river as it stood then. But the bridge had flooded. Everywhere I walked that evening had been filled in with water only eighteen hours before. And now, life was going on as it usually does in China. Street vendors and cabbies. Mahjongg and Fight the Landlord. Shish-kebab stands and bang bang men. And assholes like me were coming in droves to walk along the river, to imagine the disaster that might have been. It was hard to believe. But the evidence was there. And quite a bit of water remained. I had to leapfrog my way to the riverfront along a trail of cinder blocks set down in the murky bog that the flood had left behind in its wake. The restaurant signs had been erased, and extra large Chinese hieroglyphics went coasting down the street in a shallow stream of dull brown sewage.

I parted the crowds on my way up to the bridge. Laowai, they said. Laowai. Foreigner. Foreigner. I stopped and leaned against the balcony overlooking the river, and I smoked. The pillars holding up the bridge were marked with Chinese characters, and I recognized the characters as "low," "medium," and "high." I could see the greasy smear left behind by the flood, and it was way higher than high. But there the dirty river lay, mumbling, muttering - it looked hungover. Now, it was way lower than low.

I crossed the bridge. I wandered until I was suitably lost. Then I stopped by an internet cafe. I checked my email and read from my parents that Tibbets, my twenty year-old tabby cat, was going to be put to sleep in a couple of days. I allowed myself to laugh. Twenty years of Mr. Tibbs. The lazy orange bastard. About time, I said. Lived a full life, I told myself. A lazy life. A good life. America's Favorite Fat Cat, I chuckled. Then I caught a cab back to campus. The party broke up at 27 AM and I got up at seven the following morning.

I walked to school. I smoked a quick one in the bathroom. In the hallway, Kevin, my handler, came out of nowhere and gripped me by the arm.

"Keith," he said. "Keith."
"Yeah?"
"Keith. I have something to talk about to you."
"Oh. Jesus. Is it the video game? Ah, Christ. I mean, look. It's not my game. I didn't download it. Hell, I have nothing to do with it. It's Moose's game. And let me tell you: Moose is kind of a douchebag. A goddamned lovable douchebag for sure, but - aw, Jesus. I'm sorry. Do you know what a douchebag is? No? Well, literally speaking, it is a hygienic implement that women use to - "
"Brother. It is not about dooshy bags," said Kevin. "It is about this: I feel I don't want to live anymore."
"What? Wait. Wait. What?"
"I feel I can't go around living any longer."

I chuckled a bit and clapped Kevin on the back.

"Aw, hell," I said. "Buddy, I feel like that every day. And yet, here I am!"
"No," said Kevin. "It is more reality than that. I am dying. Every day I am dying."
"Well, then. Ahem. Well. I am very sorry to hear that. Are you sick?"
"Yes. Very sick."

I looked Kevin over and noticed - how had I missed it? - that his head had almost doubled in size since the last time I'd seen him. Its newly acquired breadth was concentrated primarily in the lymph nodes. The man was quite literally gaining face.

"Now that you mention it," I said, "your head is looking pretty big these days."
"That is something else," he said. He took my hand and held it to his jaw. "Feel it? I have a cold. My head is swell."
"Swollen," I said.
"Swallow?"
"Swollen."

Kevin took out his language notebook, jotted something down, and closed it. The bell rang.

"Well, I hope you get better," I said. "It's just a cold, right? It's not serious or anything?"
"Yes. It is just a cold."
"Good. That's good. I mean. I got some aspirin. Or actually, it's Un-Aspirin. I'm not sure what the difference is. The Peace Corps gave it to me. But it seems to work. Cures hangovers, at least. Check it. I got some right here in my pocket. You need some water to chase it down with? I can run to the store and - "
"No. Aspirin will not work. Water will not work. I feel like death. I want to die. Because of her."
He sighed until his body had all but deflated. It was then that I understood. I clapped my hands together.

"Oh! So it's lady troubles, is it?"
"Yes. I guess so," said Kevin.
"So you're not actually dying," I probed.
"Yes. I am. But not with disease."
"Good. Good. That's great news, Kevin. I am not a doctor. But women. Women I can deal with. What exactly went down, Kev?"
"I broke down with her."
"Broke up," I said.
"What?"
"Broke up with her. We say break up, not broke down."

Kevin scribbled some more in his language notebook.

"Why did you break up with her?" I asked.
"We are always breaking down. And I wanted to stop breaking down with her."
"How long have you been dating?"
"Two years."
"And how often do you break up?"
"The number of instances is uncountable."
I nodded.
"I'm familiar with that one," I said. "That's bad news bears, right there, brother. Did she want to break up this time? Or was it your decision?"
"It was my idea. But now I am fear that I will regret it. For the rest of my life."
"Yeah. Regret is a bitch. But look," I said, "you have to stick to your guns. Stick to your guns - write that down. It means, you have to make a decision and - "
"Make a decision and don't ever look back."
"Exactly. You got it. And this is a big decision, my friend. And you've already made it. So you gotta run with that shit. Or else you'll drive yourself crazy."
"Thanks, man," he said, and there was a kind of glint in his eyes. "Now I feel - I feel that I can live."
"Right on. You gotta talk about these things. Or you'll drive yourself crazy. Plenty of ways of driving yourself crazy, and very few of them are very much fun at all."
"Yeah, man. Thank you. Can you hold me?"
"Er. Yeah. I mean. Sure. That's what brothers do, right? Hug it out."

I gave Kevin a hug and he cradled his baggy jaw on my shoulder. Then he pulled away.

"Now you had better go teach your class. You are already late," he said. "And we had better talk about this after class."
"Right on. Sounds good, man. Don't die. The prospect is tempting from time to time. But it's good to stay alive. See you in the cafeteria! I mean. The canteen!"
"No, man. I am coming with you."
"Oh, you're gonna - oh. I see. You're watching my class today?"
"Yes. I will watch your class every day. Now on."

I held the door for Kevin. He took a seat in the far back of the room and immediately put his head down and went to sleep. I'm not sure, I said to myself, if that counts as watching my class, Kev. But have it your way. I bid my students a good morning. We talked about the flood, but not for very long. They didn't seem interested in it. Then I popped open my lesson plan and remembered that the title of my class that morning was "Love Connection."

Vocabulary: break up (v.), split up (v.), heartbroken (adj.), get over (v.) ...

I peered across the room at Kevin, who was actually snoring by then. I shut my folder and stuck it back in my backpack. Then I took out the American Accent Training textbook and held it up in the air.

"Alright, kids. I mean. Adults. Open your books to page ... er ... ah ... um ... ah, yes. That's the one. Open your books to page 69."

And I allowed myself to giggle.

There Will Be Flood

When the rains come softly in Sichuan, you can hear the big fat individual drops dropping like nails on the rusty aluminum overhangs of the buildings. When the rain comes down hard, you can hear nothing but the rain. It whooshes. It washes. The rain whispers loud enough, even, to drown out China. The sound of the rain envelops you like a cloud, and only the most violent of loogeys, hawked by the most pneumatic of old men, is loud enough to cut through the sonic fog.

The rain was coming down hard the night I arrived in Dazhou. And not surprisingly, I was without an umbrella. I roved the campus like a forgotten dog. It rained until my Pumas turned to sponges, and I sensed that it wasn't the kind of rain that would stop. The rain had already flooded the sewers, and would soon flood the river. And while an unseasonably boisterous tributary of the Yangtze was creeping ever closer to campus, a foul-smelling flood of considerably higher proof had already inundated the second floor of L'hôtel des Laowaix, in the French Quarter of Dazhou County, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. The moment I checked in, I knew I was in for a long and liver-curdling couple of weeks.

It was round about ten PM and my fellow Peace Corpses, from the sounds and smells of things, were well into post-banquet mode. I set my hobo bindle down beside my bed and followed the eye-watering fumes to a door at the end of the hall labeled "Andrew Moose." I made my belated entrance and bowed, gracefully and apologetically, there in the doorway.

"Panda!" shouted Moose. "Beer run!"

I suppose I deserved it. I was eight hours late, after all. But that, for once, was not my fault. Nanchong had flooded, the power had gone out, my alarm clock had shut off, the bank was closed, the barber shop wouldn't shave me, et cetera. Perhaps, I grumbled internally, these laowais should be buying me beer. Then I thought of Kevin, my Chinese handler, and what he would say given the circumstances. "What a pity you are so late. What a pity. You had better go on a beer run." No. In the land of passive-aggression, I'll take good old aggressive-aggressive American douchebagism any day of the week. So I duly bowed there in the doorway of Andrew Moose's room, and then I duly ran down to the convenience store, and then I duly opened my lint-clogged wallet and duly bought my fellow running dogs of capitalism the next round, and the next round after that. And the one after that. Because I'm nice.

So it began. And so it went. For two whole weeks, night after night, beer upon beer upon regrettable baijiu. Under the fleeting spell of formaldehyde and conversation, time seemed to stand still from time to time. But in spite of our sodden efforts - and perhaps, indeed, because of them - the second and minute and hour hands of the present inevitably groped their way into the unimaginably hungover future. Midnight begat 2 AM, and 2 AM spawned the bastard child of 4 AM, and 4 AM did unspeakable things to 5 AM, and that unholy hour presented the lot of us like a pile of stray kittens to the loathsome dawn. Still, the urge to remain awake, and to keep bullshitting, and arguing, and insulting these wonderful Western minds - in English! - persisted. Hence it would prove a long and liver-curdling couple weeks.

We weren't juvenile (twentysomething) delinquents the whole time. Far from it. During the daytime hours, we were model volunteers. We gave all, and we did some damned good work, I think. But given the circumstances, and given the living arrangements, and given the personalities involved - given all that, some amount of delinquency was inevitable. And I firmly believe that our late night delinquency was for a greater good. Perhaps I am the only one of our group of nine who will admit it, but we damn well missed each other by the time the Dazhou Experiment finally rolled around. For months, for an entire lunar year we had been working our hairy foreign hides off. And during that time, we had (at least publicly) restricted ourselves to Chinese goodthink. Can you use chopsticks? Yes. Do you like China? ... Yes. Do you have a Chinese girlfriend? ... No, not to my knowledge, no. Et cetera.

Cue the Dazhou Project. Suddenly, here were nine Type A American personalities who wanted to talk, and really talk; who wanted to drink, and really drink; who disagreed with me about everything, and really disagreed; who called me out on my bullshit; who caught my Simpsons references ... and there we were, arranged coed-wise on the second floor of a Chinese dormitory, sans-RA. So, understand that we weren't striving for delinquency - not exactly - but that the whole situation was trouble to begin with. I knew in advance that I wouldn't see most of these people ever again, and neither would they ever see me again, so we all felt the need to sneak our jabs in while we could.

Each and every night of the two-week Dazhou Experiment would prove a long night for me. Most of the other volunteers, save for a couple, were more responsible than I. Micah and Allison were generally the first to leave, but they are de facto married, so I don't fault them in the least for retiring early to their own private boudoir in order to perform their nightly duty to The Party. Jeesun would take off shortly thereafter; she has a boyfriend back in Philly to attend to, albeit virtually. Katie, as Moose's attorney and caretaker, would linger a bit, but only just long enough to make sure that Moose didn't asphyxiate on his own bullshit. Emily has managed to woo a Chinese boyfriend, and now that I know all about him and the work he does, I will refrain from saying anything else about their torrid Sino-Navajo affair - at any rate, she would receive a long-distance phone call from Chengdu around 1 AM and leave shortly after Katie. Emma, a Brit-Lit major, always hung around much longer than she ought to have, for as heated and perverse and decidedly un-Victorian as the conversation inevitably became. But even she gave up after a while. By 3 AM, the room had pretty much cleared out, leaving the unholy trinity of Moose, Jacob, and Panda to sort the universe out - until four, until five, until six AM. If there existed a 27 AM, I am sure that we would have discovered it, planted our flag in it, and stayed up 'til then.

But we had to get up at eight every morning. So there were chronological limits to our delinquency. And we pushed them. There were several nights where sleep seemed more joke than biological necessity. To sleep for one hour? Or to continue hashing out the parameters of the known and unknown universe? Both possibilities were absurd, but the latter possibility was much more fulfilling, so sleep always lost. Our conversations ranged from the banal - Super Mario 3, "Macho Man" Randy Savage, Howard Cosell - to the otherworldly, and we made our conversational leaps unpretentiously and - or so it seemed to me at the time - seamlessly. But not always peacefully. There were tense moments where a three-man battle royale seemed on the verge of breaking out. But cooler heads always prevailed. And at the end of the night, fistpounds were exchanged. And on more than a few occasions, awkward three-way manbraces were shared. I learned much from those firewater-side chats, and in retrospect, I certainly wouldn't trade them for eighty hours of sleep that, as it turns out, I wouldn't need anyway.

And I'd love to transcribe some of those firewater-side chats for you. But anyone who has heard one's own voice on a tape recorder, or who has seen oneself on television, or who has watched someone else's impersonation of oneself is familiar with the extreme discomfort involved in retelling an inside joke, or reenacting a conversation, or replicating a personality. The microwaved, leftover result is unpalatable, to say the least. So, try as I might (and try I won't), I cannot and will not regurgitate any of the conversations that took place over the course of those two long, liver-curdling weeks. At this point, I'm not sure I can even remember them, though they changed me in such a way that long-term memory is insufficient and unnecessary. I suppose I will resign myself to saying that those two weeks were pseudointellectually significant for me, and then I will resign myself to finally getting on with my Great Flood of Dazhou saga, which may or may not be pseudointellectually significant for you.

That first night, I went to sleep at 27 AM. And then I woke up at 8 AM and taught teachers how to teach. As an icebreaker, I had my students (teachers) interview each other. They chatted in English. Pleased as hell, I walked around the room and constructively eavesdropped. Then I asked for a few volunteers to introduce their partners to the class. After a surreal two-minute standoff where nobody was quite able to muster the cojones to speak, I called on a fortysomething gentleman in the front row.

"Would you mind telling me about your English partner, Mr., er, ah, Zhang?"
"Sorry, teacher. But I cannot speak," said Mr. Zhang.
"Don't be shy! We're all friends here," I rejoined.
A round of applause from the studio audience. I felt, briefly, like Tony Robbins.
"No. Really I cannot speak," said Mr. Zhang. He slid his cellphone out from his pants pocket. "My father's hometown is flood and I must telephone my father. To see if he is still living."
"Jesus," I said. "Christ. No. Go. Call your father."
Mr. Zhang bowed slightly and ducked out of the room.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I announced, "if any of you are concerned about the existence of your relatives, please do not ask to leave my classroom. Just go."
My students took notes.

Somewhere along my errant way to Dazhou, I had drawn the short end of the chopstick, so I not only had to teach four hours that first day, but I also had to give a two-hour lecture on American Culture at 2 PM sharp. I raided Moose's stores of Nescafe and spent the early afternoon pacing the narrow, moldy perimeters of my hotel room, practicing my delivery, perfecting my timing, stiffarming my hangover. Then, well before I was ready, it came time to perform. What follows, I am sure, will seem like hyperbole. Because what follows will seem mostly unbelievable. And I realize that I have a habit of exaggerating or rearranging events in such a way that they make pseudoliterary sense. But what follows is what happened, more or less, as far as I can remember - and Moose as my witness, to the best of my ability, I have refrained from distorting these next five or ten paragraphs. Though I haven't written them yet, I know they will be very hard to write. It is easy, in my experience, to make the mundane interesting. It is infinitely more difficult to render reality believable.

It was a hot day and it had finally stopped raining. I swaggered into the lecture hall at 1:30 PM, unfashionably dressed but fashionably early. Kevin, my handler, embraced me against my will and asked if I wanted some water. Sure, I said. Give me two kuai, he said. Grumbling, I forked over twopence of my Peace Corps blood money, then I dished my USB stick to the IT Guy and stepped up to the podium. I checked out the audience. Hundreds of Chinese English teachers sat before me, fanning themselves, hawking loogies, toggling through the ringtones of their thousand-dollar Nokias. Check one two, I mumbled into the microphone. Check one two.

My American Culture 101 Powerpoint opens with the oldest trick in the Powerpoint book. A picture of Samuel L. Jackson. A picture of Daniel Day-Lewis. A picture of Khalil Gibran. A picture of Francis Fukuyama. Which of these individuals, I ask, is American? I cringe. I shudder. I drink more Nescafe. The Rest of the World would laugh me out of the lecture hall. But I have given this lecture all over Sichuan Province, and always the response has been the same.

Samuel L. is, at first, not American. An overwhelming NO from the audience. Then a murmuring ensues. Followed by a ruckus. The NBA is cited. LeBron and Kobe are cited. China loves basketball, and American basketball players are almost always black, so maybe, the audience figures, just maybe Americans can be black. After much heated debate, black people are agreed upon as perhaps, possibly, maybe Americans. Samuel L. Jackson is possibly, maybe, perhaps American.

Daniel Day-Lewis is unquestionably American at first, but my audience is clever and they sense a trick. So they shout a muddled yes/no that sounds something like "sysonooayshuysuesnoysy." Which I interpret as: maybe yes, maybe no. Daniel Day-Lewis is maybe American, maybe not American.

Then comes Khalil Gibran. Bearded, olive-skinned, Middle Eastern. The oldest Powerpoint trick in the Powerpoint book has been suddenly and completely forgotten. This man is not American. He is a Muslim. He is Osama Bin-Laden. He is a terrorist. NO, shouts the audience, NO NO NO. An overwhelming NO.

And then, Francis Fukuyama, who has been proclaiming (albeit absurdly) the end of history for several decades in unaccented English, he cannot be American, either. Because he is Chinese. He is one of us. NO, shouts the crowd, NO NO NO. An overwhelming NO.

I take a long swig of Nescafe. Next slide, I murmur. And cue the punchline: all of these people, but one, are Americans. Samuel L. Jackson is an American, Khalil Gibran is an American, and Francis Fukuyama is an American. But Daniel Day-Lewis, if he were in character, would pummel you with bowling balls for calling him American. He happens to be Irish, and he happens to have starred in one of my favorite films of all time, There Will Be Blood, a film that Jacob, my fellow volunteer, happens to hate with a fiery passion that will never die, and so on.

So it goes with my college kids: Americans are white and blue-eyed and yellow-haired and they are rich and they don't love their families and they can only eat beef and bread. And so it went, at first, with my teachers in Dazhou, who had been studying English for a quarter-century, who had (for a not insignificant amount of time) been steeped in some warped interpretation of American Culture. Disappointing, of course. Frustrating, certainly. But such is my work. By now, I am no longer fazed or unfazed by it. Neither jaded nor gilded. By now, I am merely determined.

I ruthlessly guzzled from my Thermos of Nescafe, and then I gave my students (my teachers) some hard statistics. True, America is mostly Caucasian, but it probably won't remain so. Cue pie chart. True, America was once rich, but it doesn't currently appear to be so. Cue line graph. True, America was born a Christian nation, though it certainly is not so today. Cue anecdote.

"My students often ask me if I am a Christian," I said. "'Teacher, you believe in Jesus, yes?' And I tell my students that, no, I do not believe in the Christian idea of god -"

I was so startled by what happened next that I did not appreciate the timing. Only much later did my fellow volunteers inform me (laughing their asses off) that my last words before the blackout were, "I do not believe in the Christian idea of god." So I hope their testimony contributes to whatever credibility I have as a narrator. It really happened this way, and I suppose that I am burdened with the responsibility of proving it.

I do not believe in the Christian idea of god, I said, period. And then, suddenly, all was dark, or slightly dimmed. My microphone was dead. The projector screen had gone black. My Chinese handlers sprung into action, were scrambling all over the place, fumbling with cords, unplugging and replugging electrical wires. Only after a full minute of total chaos did I begin to entertain the idea that the impending flood might have had something to do with anything. My audience, meanwhile, was caught up in an old-timey courtroom uproar. What's the big idea?, etc. I stood there at the podium, looking around for a gavel to bang.

My handlers in the front row gestured for me to keep going, to keep lecturing. But speaking over an audience of 300 Chinese adults, even with the aid of a PA system, is an exercise in ... well, it's really too much exercise to be worth anyone's while. My vocal cords were no match for the loogey-hawking masses. I knew that much from experience. So I tightroped the ledge of the stage and cleared my throat several times, then I paced back and forth and hawked a false loogey - perhaps this might summon their attention - and then, finally, I stood stock still behind the podium, scratched my head like the fop I am, and surveyed the scene. And as my eyes searched the audience for an audience, I spotted Moose a few rows back and saw that he had collapsed into his desk, and that he was laughing so hard that a Rorschach blotch of sweat had formed on the back of his shirt. And that set me off. I started laughing and I could not stop. I faceplanted into the podium and laughed into my elbowpits until there were no more laughs to be laughed. And then I hooted to myself, took a swig of Nescafe, and wandered off to the bathroom to take a much-needed piss. Eventually, I wandered out to the balcony for a much-needed smoke.

My students (teachers) had assembled there to watch the gathering flood. And after I'd lit my ciggie and recovered from the divine relief it afforded, I grew as entranced as my students were with nature's bubbling wrath. The raging brown waters of the pseudo-Yangtze were ten feet beneath us and rising. According to my neurotic calculations, the lecture hall would flood well before the end of my two-hour lecture. Meanwhile, traditional Sichuanese debris rafted past. A hot-pot table coasted by and my students shouted out the English word, "table!" The carved wooden fringes of a Buddhist temple floated past and in unison, my students said, "pagoda." We were learning vocabulary. Improving our Oral English. At one point, a vague, yellowish blob bobbed along downstream and several of my students murmured, "body." For the life of me, I couldn't tell how serious they were.

Katie, who was scheduled to follow up my lecture with something far more educational and informative, came out to the balcony and, unperturbed by the pending rapture, started playing with the roly-polies on the banister. She pinched one of them between her fingers and held it up, legs writhing, for all to see.

"This is a roly-poly," she said to my students, in her delightful sing-song teacher voice. "We have them in America, too!"
"Roly-poly," my students chanted. "Roly-poly!"

Though I love all creatures great and small, I would never lobby Congress on the behalf of insects, which I find terrifying and disgusting and insulting to all humanity. But Katie, bless her South Carolinian heart, right there and then set about crushing one unsuspecting Chinese roly-poly after another in the vain attempt to make them roll in the Western mode. And I could not abide.

"Jesus God. You're killing them!" I shouted.
"But they're roly-polies," she said, squishing one between her fingers. "They're supposed to roll!"
"No. They're Chinese roly-polies," I said. "They're Confucian. Who knows what they will do when provoked?"

And what they did was this: they died. En masse. Feebly, I tried to stop Katie, but she was on a mission. A crusade. She aimed to convert these heathen, anti-roly polies with the sword. To Katie's mind, these lightly armored Chinese insects were roly-polies, whether they knew it or not, and she would teach them how to roll by force, if necessary. It got ugly real fast. She killed at least eight of them before I could stop her. Meanwhile, my students (teachers) were murmuring the words "roly-poly" and "dead." I tried to disrupt Katie's Inquisition by pointing out a daddy long legs that happened to be high-stepping its way up a nearby wall. And I was genuinely excited. I hadn't seen a daddy long legs in years, not since I lived in Missouri, and was amazed to find one in Dazhou, of all places.

"Daddy long legs!" I shouted.
"Daddy long legs," repeated my students.
"House," a few of them murmured, as somebody's living room tumbled past.
"Daddy long legs," I said.
"Car," they agreed.
"Roly-poly," they remembered.
"Dead."
"Bicycle."
"Daddy long legs."
"Dead."
"Tire."
"Roly-poly."
"Tree."
"Dead."
"Table."

Katie reached for the daddy long legs and I smacked her hand.

Then Kevin, my handler, embraced me from behind and dragged me back into the lecture hall.

"Good news. We have a generator," he said. "The power is on. You had better finish your lecture now."

Evidently, my Powerpoint would continue, even as our lives were transitioning ever more ominously towards the final slide.

I reassumed the stage. Check onetwo, I said into the revived microphone, check onetwo. A round of applause. I opted to skip over the blasphemous segment of my lecture and said, hastily, "Not everyone in America is a Christian. Moving right along -" And then there came a deafening pop from the PA system and the lights went out again.

More scrambling. More plugging and replugging. I paced the stage. I took a swig of Nescafe. Then, outside, the flood sirens went off. Which did much in the way of convincing me that I was not merely neurotic, that I hadn't overdosed on Nescafe, that in fact there was a very real natural disaster about to take place. And who was I to lecture on diversity in the face of the all-devouring apocalypse? That, or something like it, was the modest appeal I levied against my handlers, in Chinese and in English, but they were not to be persuaded. The show must go on, after all. My handlers did not seem aware of any conflict of interest, not even of that one interest we are all interested in as humans, as living things, as organisms: that of survival. Out of politeness, I fought the urge to run for the hills. Then I conquered that urge and stood there on stage like Merriam-Webster's definition of an oaf. Though my audience was, by that time, either half-panicked or half-asleep, my handlers insisted that my lecture must proceed, and that my audience must remain. In the moments that followed, my handlers spontaneously generated a generator that regenerated the generator which revived the electrical system of the lecture hall in which I was supposed to complete my lecture while the gathering flood threatened to dampen the whole damned party, and that right soon.

The projector screen fired up again. The microphone screeched, a banshee of feedback. I took a long swig of Nescafe - my last, I wondered? - cleared my throat and proceeded.

"Anyhow. America is a very diverse place. Diverse. Many different kinds of people. And some of them don't believe in - "

The speakers popped, the screen went black. There was a kind of finality about the third blackout that pleased me. I was free, and I knew it. My heart rejoiced for its renewed prospect of beating and thumping and stumbling into the indefinite future. The crowd got up to leave. I stepped down from the stage. My handler negotiated with his handler for a time - perhaps there was a third meta-generator in the broom closet? - then he slowly approached, gripped me by the bicep, and told me that my lecture had been postponed until tomorrow.

"Sweet. Will there be a tomorrow?" I asked, as a matter of journalistic interest.
"Yes. Always," my handler said.
"Cool. Thanks for the water," I said, and took a grateful swig from my bottle of Nongfu Springs, even as the undrinkable, unfishable, unswimmable springs of Dazhou County began to trickle into the lecture hall. I rolled up my pantlegs, and so did everyone else. Then, right on cue, hordes of barechested Chinese peasants entered stage right and started loading the amplifiers, the computers, the podium, et al, started hauling everything out of the auditorium. Much panting, much chanting, many loogeys were hawked. Exit Panda stage left.

I ran into Jacob on the way to the hotel. He was sweaty and short of breath, dressed in Marvel Comics-themed athletic attire.

"Aren't you supposed to be lecturing, man?"
"Canceled," I said, "due to apocalypse. Whatchoo doing?"
"I was just playing basketball. With the children," he added dismissively. "You had lunch yet?"

We went to the cafeteria, or what Chinese students refer to (in their delightfully Orwellian English) as the "canteen." The food wasn't half-bad, but it wasn't half-good, either. Moose joined us after a bit. We laughed a lot, as we are wont to do, and our laughs echoed. Aside from the three of us, the canteen was empty. But before we'd had time to give up on our food, the canteen began to fill up with shirtless peasants. They lingered around for a while and smoked, spat on the floor, shouted at each other. It wasn't clear, at first, why they were there at all. Then they sprung into action. They smoked and spat their way outside, and under the command of some derelict peasant captain, started hauling in tables, desks, chairs, sound equipment, computers, et al. They were at work. They were preparing for the flood. They deposited all the heavy, valuable stuff in the back of the canteen. A questionable move, I thought, given the proximity of the canteen to the very flood waters they were trying to avoid. These gnarled old men were moving tens of tons of equipment up a single flight of stairs, while the river, from the looks of things, appeared quite capable of washing Dazhou right off the map. Rearranging rickshaws on the Titanic, or however the idiom goes.

I couldn't bring myself to finish my undercooked twice-cooked pork and I was in desperate need of a nap, so I bid zai jian to my 27 AM partners in absurdity and left the canteen.

In China, crowds will gather around just about anything worth watching - a fatal car accident, a cellphone promotion, a Tibetan junk vendor, a laowai - and the crowds had turned out in droves for the Great Flood of Dazhou. As a foreigner, I tend to avoid crowds, because if I'm not careful, I will become the center of their attention. But I happened to be passing by. Happened to have nothing better to do. And I happened to be very curious about the horde of people standing outside the canteen, because they weren't talking much, weren't smiling, were unusually sullen for a pack of Chinese rubberneckers. So I wormed my way into the crowd and got up on my tippy-toes to see what, exactly, they were looking at.

There were two attractions, I suppose. First of all, there were the peasants: the lao bai xing, the bang bang men. These men are the beauty of China. They represent all that is good. They carry burdens for a living. And there they were, hauling the Dazhou University Music Department pianos up and out of the flood zone. Impossibly old men carrying pianos. They say an ant can lift 50 times its own weight. The bang bang men worked in crews of eight. Eight scrawny old, wiry old shirtless men, lifting a baby grand out of the muck and up an uneven flight of stairs, then collectively lugging it twenty feet before setting it down with a gentle thump! in the rear of the students' canteen. Fascinating, inspiring, horrible to watch. The coxswain would bark - HEAVE! - and seven oldsters would chant, HEAVE HEAVE HEAVE. HEAVE! HEAVE HEAVE HEAVE. HEAVE! HEAVE HEAVE HEAVE. These men were old enough to be your great-grandpa, if not greater. I stood there and watched. I couldn't believe that these oldsters, scrawny and malnourished as they were, were up to the task, and there were moments where it seemed the piano would slip from their fingers, tumble end over end, and smash with a splash and a Thelonious Monk discord at the flooded foot of the stairs. But the bang bang men persevered and got the job done without fail. They delivered twelve baby grands to the canteen without so much as a scratch, while they, the scarred, bruised, battered lao bai xing, were already well beyond repair.

But the main attraction was the river itself. It flowed and it raged. It thundered. It muscled along like an unimaginably large serpent snaking past in the gathering gloom. It rumbled. It breathed. It held us under its spell. The old men weaved their legs into the balcony and sat, smoking cigarettes and watching the river. Here was nature, our old nemesis, our one-time adversary, now strapped down to the bed, etherized, tranquilized, subdued. Long ago we conquered it, put signs all over it, made it a tourist attraction. Were awfully smug about all that, and justifiably so. But now, the river, on a whim, had reduced us all to ants. Reminded us that yes, we had defeated it, but could nevertheless be washed away, erased, obliterated with a careless shrug of the shoulders. The river. I couldn't take my eyes off it. The power there. I thought nothing, felt nothing. I was not afraid. Understand, I fear petty things, and fear them deeply. I am afraid of insects, Styrofoam, flying in airplanes. I fear chalkboards and advanced mathematics and swimming pools. But I did not fear the river right then, or the annihilation it promised with a mudshot wink as the smog-blurred sun fell down behind its back. I was interested in the river. I studied it. I was, I suppose, learning from it.

One month before I set out on my Dazhou adventure, well before much of western China flooded, I wrote the following:

One day the river will march single file, overflowing its banks, and it will inundate the world in its uniform earthtone, reflecting itself and itself and itself, on and on forever, and it will wash all the dirt away like a glass of lemonade spilled onto an anthill.

I wrote those words with a lot of caffeine in my system, and I wrote them about a thoroughly domesticated creek in Chengdu. That creek will never flood. I imagined it could at the time, that it was capable. But I did not mean for those words to be prophetic. I didn't foresee the Great Flood of Dazhou. At the time, I foresaw another cup of coffee, and that is all. But I do find those words rather apropos when I think back on that uncertain evening in Dazhou, watching the waters tumble past in the background, even as they seeped and inched their way into the foreground. Wondering how to react, wondering whether I should panic, whether I should laugh, whether I should feel anything at all. Wondering whether I ought not to call somebody important and cancel the whole Dazhou Experiment straightaway. But no, I have always found that the best course of action is inaction, especially in times of helplessness. Past a certain point, you have to let go and recognize your role as an ant, as a pebble caught in the flood of history, of physics, of nature, and all the rest. We are pebbles, I suppose. No more, no less. And once you let go, the whole existential shitshow is tremendously fun to watch, free will be damned. Let go. Enjoy. Laugh. And try to write about it, if you have time. Over the years, I have come to accept my place as an observer, as a pebble, as a somewhat intelligent ant. There remains much to overcome, much to be fought for, much to rebel against, and humanity needs a great deal of help in that direction. But I am no longer interested in hauling baby grands up uneven staircases. That job, perhaps, belongs to other, more courageous pebbles. That task is beyond me. I like to watch, and to think, and to laugh, and to write about the shitshow as it unravels. Why are we here? What is human destiny? What does it all mean? I have my guesses, but I don't know. Nobody knows. And I don't suppose anyone ever will. But isn't it pretty to wonder about?

Down by the river, while I gawked, a couple of college girls hovered in my hairy midst. They giggled about me, chatted to each other about me, worked up the courage to talk to me. And after a while I preemptively struck: I talked to them. They were from Zigong, but had come to Dazhou to study. They were freshmen.

"Do you live on campus?" I asked in my motley Mandarin.
"Yes," one of the girls said. "We live here."
She indicated the dormitory in front of us.
"We live there."
"That's awfully close to the river," I said. "Aren't you worried about the flood?"
"Yes. Very much so," she said. "If the water gets any higher, we're going to have to move all of our things."
"Where will you move them?" I asked.
"We don't know."

The girl giggled, blushed. Her accomplice was silent, giggled a bit. I was the first foreigner they had ever spoken to or giggled with. The flood seemed like a serious enough dilemma to me, but the girls were more shaken by their first conversation with a laowai than they were by the looming deluge.

The sun went down. It floated for a moment like a mandarin orange on the surface of the river. Then it sank beneath the waters and the light vanished. The world dimmed, the shadows spread, and only the immediate foreground remained visible: the flooded shops, the climbing waters, silhouettes, cigarette ends that blossomed and faded into the darkness. I took out my battered cellphone and sent a quick message to Jacob: "The river is climbing up the steps to campus. Ought to come see it." I waited, but Jacob didn't answer, and he didn't come out to watch. Meanwhile, the river inched and centimetered its way up the stairs. The same stairs the oldsters had climbed an hour before, chanting and spitting, with pianos on their backs. The brown waters made their way up the stairs, stood poised halfway for a moment like an asthmatic old man, and then they climbed further - subtly, almost imperceptibly, like a tedious argument of insidious intent, to borrow a quote.

I bid farewell to the college girls, wished them luck, and walked back to the hotel. I lit a cigarette along the way, smoked it for a bit, but stubbed it out before I could really enjoy it. I waved to the desk clerk and went upstairs. Perhaps, I hoped, Moose would buy me the first round. And perhaps life would proceed as normal in spite of the flood. I would sleep at 27 AM, wake up at 8 AM and teach teachers how to teach. There will be a tonight and there will be a tomorrow. This is the assumption we all must make. It's no leap of faith in my book. It is a necessity. What else do we have? Life will resume as it always has. The show must go on. Eventually, I suppose, it won't. But isn't it pretty to think so? And isn't it unpleasant to think otherwise?

Before The Flood

My handler met me at the Dazhou Train Station. We shook hands. He introduced himself as Kevin. Then he apologized for not being a chick.

"I know it is American tradition for man serve the woman and woman serve the man," he said, "but there is some confusion before you arrive. My boss, she is thinking you are a woman. So she give me to you. Man serve the man. Very strange."
"Wait. She thought I was a woman?" I blinked violently. "Didn't she see my passport picture?"
"Yes," said Kevin, "but still there is some doubt."

We walked. Three days of ceaseless rain had flooded the square. I rolled up my pantlegs and forded the filth Oregon Trail style.

"What a pity you are so late," said Kevin.
"Well," I said, "as I mentioned on the phone, Nanchong flooded last night and the power went out. So I apologize if I'm late. But there were - ahem - technical difficulties."
"That is not what I mean," said Kevin. "I don't mean to be a burden. But you are very late. What a pity."
"I did my best to get here on time," I said, my left eyeball twitching involuntarily, "and I'm sorry if I'm late. But I didn't miss anything important, did I? And anyway, I've told you several times what happened. Nanchong flooded, so the power went out, so my alarm didn't go off, so I overslept, so I missed my 9 AM train, so I had to catch the 5 PM train to Dazhou. So yes, I am a little late. And I'm sorry if I missed the banquet or whatever. But I'm lucky to have gotten here at all."
"Yes," said Kevin, and I could've sworn I caught him smirking ever so slightly, "but what a pity."

We took a cab to campus and got out at the main gate. Kevin asked me what I wanted for dinner.
"I dunno," I said. "Chinese?"

He sat and watched me eat my kung pao chicken.
"Are you sure you don't want anything?" I asked.
"No. As I mentioned earlier," he said, "I have already eaten. At the banquet. You missed the banquet, remember? What a pity you missed the banquet."
I lowered my chopsticks and took a deep breath. Then I resumed eating.
"Is the kung pao chicken very delishurs?" asked Kevin.
"I dunno about delishurs, but it's pretty good."
"Yes. But sadly. It cannot be as good as the banquet food. What a pity you are so late."
"Yeah," I said, "what a pity."
I flagged down the laobar and ordered a beer.

Easy, Panda, I told myself. Chill. Eat some bamboo. Drink some formaldehyde beer. In the words of George Harrison: all things must pass. Even dinners with passive-aggressive twerps. Those dinners, too, must pass. Christ. Not even twenty minutes into the handler/handlee relationship and I'd already let the kid get under my skin. Ordinarily, I am not so easily irked, but I really had busted my ass to get to Dazhou on time, and nature really had conspired to keep me in Nanchong. I'll be the first to admit it: I am a flake. I was born late, via C-section. And ever since, I have been hustling to catch up. I am chronically delayed, waylaid, held up, hung up, behind, belated, and otherwise late in the least fashionable way imaginable. But on this one, isolated occasion in my life, I was justified in my tardiness. Nanchong flooded. It flooded, and I am no Moses. Hell, I don't even know how to swim.

It was a Saturday night in Nanchong. When the storm first arrived, I was, as usual, unimpressed. I am a Nebraskan. Thunderstorms, even tornadoes, are little more than a source of giddy adventure for me. Over the years, I have evolved an internal barometer that tells me when to scoop up the cats and run for the basement. Sichuan is not quite tornado alley. It's more like a bowling alley, where Thor rolls nothing but gutterballs. The storms here are weak sauce. So I was unperturbed when the billowy black thunderheads came rolling in. There was no lightning, only a kind of effervescence in the clouds. And the thunder was a low and feeble gurgling, like a concerto for sousaphone and farting grandpa. Like I said, weak sauce. It was 1 AM and I was busy getting a head start on packing, stuffing all my worldly possessions into my hobo bindle. My worldly possessions these days mostly consist of boxer briefs: Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, BVD, bootleg Chinese undies with the Playboy Bunny's bucktoothed doppelganger stitched into the ass. The thing about life is, you wind up with too much underwear and not enough clothes.

When I'd finished packing, I set about tidying my room. After a while, I grew so depressed at the futility of cleaning that I had to sit down at the computer and watch a World Cup's Greatest Goals montage to cheer me up. GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAALLLLL! ... GOOOAAA - Boom. There came an impressive stomp of thunder and I could hear the reverberation rippling up the aluminum bleachers of English Corner Stadium. Boom - zzzip! I got up from my desk chair and lifted the curtain just in time to see the Epcot Center Cafeteria across the street light up like a Tesla coil.

"... the fuck?" I asked the Royal Me, and received no reply. Then there came another lightning strike, this one even closer, and I leapt away from the computer. The power went out. My laptop dimmed slightly. GOOOAAALLLLL!

I backed away from the window, stumbled over my Peace Corps medical kit and cracked my head against the doorframe. Fuck, I said. I groped around in the dark until I found the washing machine. Ah, yes. It had been doing my laundry up until the power went out. Now all my clothes were lying there in a wet heap. Double fuck. I highstepped over the garbage in the hallway and stood in the middle of the living room, listening. An ominous whooshing filled the apartment and when the next lightning strike came, I saw that my bedroom curtains were pasted up against the ceiling. I began to shake. This was not weak sauce. I paced back and forth like a frightened dog. At any moment, I expected a funnel to take form in my living room and blow the whole stinking mess sky high. They'd find my boxer briefs in Shanghai. The Yangtze would be clogged with abortive journal entries from yours truly. Plastic tubes of Astroglide would rain down on Sichuan for weeks, courtesy of the Peace Corps medical office.

But tornado or no, I had no basement to scurry down into and no cats to keep me company. So I decided to sleep or die trying. It was 2 AM and I needed to be up in six hours, so I crawled into bed. The bedsheets were drenched in rain. The curtains kept smacking me in the face. I plugged my phone into the wall and set the alarm. Then I lay there awake while the torrential rains turned Nanchong into a rice paddy. By 3 AM, I still couldn't sleep and bloodshot desperation set in, so I did something I have only done once before: I popped a sleeping pill. Gradually, I sank into a kind of metaphysical troth and watched the storm rage for another hour until one last bolt of lightning sent me into a short-lived coma.

But the coma wasn't short-lived enough. Something I had failed to consider when I plugged the phone into the wall: there was no power. I might as well have plugged the damned thing into a pineapple. So the alarm didn't go off. So while my 8 AM train was clickety-clacketing its way off to Dazhou, my phone was a vegetable and so was I.

It was the strangest awakening of my life, and all of them have been strange. A white bolt from a gray sky shot me upright in bed. It was 10 AM and it was still storming outside. It took me several minutes to remember who and where I was. Then, sifting through the coffee-stained manila folders of my mind, I remembered vaguely that there was something I was supposed to do, somewhere I was supposed to be ...

Shit, fuck, etc. The power was still out, my phone was dead, and my laundry was half-washed and starting to mildew. I hung it up to dry. Then I took a cold shower. A glance in the mirror reminded me that I was still bearded. I was going to Dazhou to work, and professionalism in China does not involve looking like Bob Veila after a two-week do-it-yourself bender. But I wasn't about to hack at all that Irish scrubgrass with a Bic razor. So I put on some cargo shorts and a dirty undershirt, walked to the nearest barber shop, and asked them if they could shave me.

"We can't shave you electrically," announced the barber. "There is no power. But."
He approached me with an unlathered razor. I threw my hands up and backed slowly out onto the street.

I caught a cab downtown. Downtown, there was power. But the sewers had overflowed and the taxi cabs jetted spumes of brown semisolids as they passed. I wielded my umbrella like a shield. Tides of sewage rolled over the sidewalk whenever the streetlights changed and a competition broke out among the Chinese pedestrians to see who was courageous enough to cross the Brown Sea. I watched and waited. The Chinese women proved their meddle by tromping through the filth high-heels and all. The young men, not surprisingly, were colossal wussies about the whole thing and tried to pass over the sludge by clambering across the rungs of a nearby fence. A troupe of Germans materialized on the scene and, ever the sensible ones, decided to avoid the Scheisswasser altogether. Their leader, an overweight fellow in a too-tight t-shirt, shouted loudly, matter-of-factly, in a strange tongue that no one but me could understand, "Well, we must go around, then!" And the other Germans followed him. They turned and marched single file down the sidewalk, crossed the unflooded portion of the street, and marched down the opposite sidewalk unscathed. Only much later did the thought occur to me: Germans? In Nanchong? ... the fuck?

I waded across the filth. Then I got myself shampooed, scalp massaged, and shaved for 80 cents US. Then I bought a pair of sweatshop dress shirts for four bucks a pop. The next and final step was to get mine ass on board a train, or preferably a bus. I caught a cab to the biggest bus station in town, but they told me to go to the smallest bus station in town. My cabbie the second time around was the splitting image of Jackie Chan. I am not being racist, here: this man closely resembled Jackie Chan. And I began to feel like his laowai sidekick in a half-ass buddy comedy.

"Where are you going?" he asked me.
"Dazhou," I said.
"They've probably sold out of tickets."
"But I've got to get to Dazhou tonight," I said. "There's a banquet, or something."
"If they're sold out, what are you gonna do?"
"I have no idea," I said. "What can I do?"
Cabbie Chan was mum on this point. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. Then he screeched to a halt on the side of the road.
"Check it out," he said. "Look at that beautiful girl."
And indeed, a rather stacked Sichuanese woman was sauntering our way.
"In Sichuan, there are many beautiful women," said Cabbie Chan, "and I try to stop for them whenever I can."

Cabbie Chan dropped off the girl, then he dropped me off at the bus station. The black market cabbie urchins closed in around me. WHERE ARE YOU GOING? WHERE ARE YOU GOING? I elbowed and stiffarmed my way into the bus station. Needless to say, all tickets to Dazhou had been sold out, not just for the day in question, but also for the next day, and the one after that. I thrust my hands in my pockets and wandered back out to the parking lot, gave myself over to the long-distance cab racket. But I had spurned them and now they were ignoring me. I walked in circles but nobody seemed to notice me. So I began to call out the word "Dazhou." Dazhou, Dazhou, Dazhou. A hunchbacked man with pronounced acne scars approached.

"Dazhou?"
"Dazhou."
"700 kuai!"
"But I don't have that kind of money," I said. "I'm a volunteer."
"A what?"
"Nevermind. 500 kuai."
He shook his head.
"That's not gonna work. 600 kuai."
600 kuai. A hundred bucks. I bit my tongue and fumbled around in my wallet. The cabbie urchin extended his palms eagerly. Then, Cabbie Chan came to the rescue.

"600 kuai? Are you crazy?" he snapped. "This man is a foreigner. He doesn't know any better. He is our guest. Don't cheat him."

Cabbie Chan grabbed my arm and flicked his head towards his cab. He had been waiting for me the whole time.
"Let's go. I'll take you to the train station."

I followed Cabbie Chan and the cabbie urchin gave chase.
"Hey! Hey! Hey!"
"Hey hey hey," snorted Chan. "Idiot."

We sped off. The cabbie urchin chased us for a bit, then faded into the industrial haze.

I am wary of Chinese trains. They tend to be a crap shoot. As in: there is poop on the floor half the time. For that reason, among others, I hadn't ridden a Chinese train in six months. But my handlers had told me to get to Dazhou as early as possible, by whatever means possible, so that I might attend some sort of event that may or may not have been important. So I risked it. And as luck would have it, thanks to Cabbie Chan, I found myself in a relatively cozy bullet train bound for Dazhou, with no poop on the floor, and due to arrive only eight hours later than I'd originally planned. Of course, I missed the inaugural banquet by a couple hours. What a pity. But I did make it, floods and power outages and all. So I figured that I'd be welcomed in Dazhou with a tickertape parade. Instead, it was a listless Kevin, a lukewarm beer, and a tepid plate of kung pao chicken.

"Yes, what a pity that you were so late," Kevin said as we were walking home. "The banquet was very delishurs."

By then, the two bottles of Yanjing were doing their job, so I was able to laugh Kevin off in the Chinese manner. But then I stopped dead in my tracks because something in my periphery hadn't rubbed me the right way. I doubled back and peered down a dimly lit alleyway. In the not-so-distant distance was a river, and the river was raging.

"Um," I said.
"Yes," said Kevin, "the river is very high today."
"Is that normal?" I asked.
"No."

All along the riverside, there were old Chinese men, standing and watching the river. A bad sign. And I stood there for a moment to watch the river with them. It rolled past like a python. The crests of the waves gleamed in the moonlight. I had never seen anything like it, such natural rage. Such strength. I had never felt such powerlessness. Then, Kevin yanked me by the arm. And I walked.

"I forgot to say to you," he said, "that class is begin tomorrow."
"What?" I asked. I had forgotten all about the river. "What? When?"
"Eight AM. Sunday morning class is begin. What a pity you were late. I tell you earlier if you are not so late."
"Yes," I said, "what a pity."

So tomorrow began the next morning. I suppose that made sense. Then I shook Kevin loose and darted back to steal one last glance at the raging river. Marvelous. Horrific. The silent Chinese men knew. Tomorrow began the next morning, but whether or not tomorrow came was another question entire.