FACELIFT

Spring cleaning.
You look fine.
Nice ass.

DEATH IS FREEDOM, GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, POOP MODEL

Era: Stalinism.
I: Russian intelligentsia prisoner of the political sort. Male. I appear like bald Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn just short of his release from the Gulag, gaze stripped of hope and dignity.
Location: Underneath a medieval stone castle immersed in sewage water, accompanied by two others: an unmemorable buddy, and an eccentric Golum-looking fellow.
We are discovered by a lady security guard. They kill off my friends. In a desperate attempt to survive, I climb up a tower, towards an opening. The outside is gray. It is the first time in a long time I see dry and sky. This fills me with such happiness and hope, I refuse to descend to the despondencies of prison. I jump out of the tower, serenely plunging to my death.

Era: Present
Location: Anywhere in Russia, where the youth frolics about bucolic landscapes on bicycles in numbers.
I: Am Johanna. A student of architecture, and I'm assigned to a group of progressive students who make beautiful models of concrete mixed with their own shit. I'm concerned over the best way to transport my shit in ziplock bags from home to studio without gaining stares. My fellow group mates encourage me to sell excess shit to the proletariat for $1.00 in dollars.

FIRST-YEAR ROOMMATES, CLOSET SHOWER, CHILDHOOD HOME

While I take a shower inside the closet of my childhood room*, my first-year roommate is getting prepared for a date with a man she had met in Germany. She asks me all the questions one girl asks another when she anxiously readies herself like a sacrificial lamb for the alter, eyes fixated on nothing more than her own reflection: "Does this swirly top work better than that less swirly top?", "The jeans, should I stuff them inside my boots like a hooker does, or should I not, and be more modest? I should not, huh, since I really like this kid." These are questions of importance if you are still an active participant of the Mating Seasons.

After my roommate leaves*, I am still showering inside the closet**. I receive a phone call from one of Ryan's sister's friends, who screams into my end of the receiver: "How dare you hurt that man!", and hangs up. I furiously punch numbers into the dial-pad. Oh! But the audacity!

Besides being the Summer Olympics opening, dear Reader, 08-08 is also Chinese Father's Day. Thank you for reading.

*For the kill. Rawr.

**Not an easy task; I am trying my best not to spoil my childhood clothes with water.

RAIN, END OF BIKE RIDE, HANDLEBAR TAPE

A chiaroscuro of a dark evening when the sun has just completely set.  My eyes, however, can still make out a little more than just the silhouettes of things.  It had just finished raining or it was about to rain.  There is a group of us, and we had just completed a 60-miles bike ride; I was feeling great.  We waited in a melancholic garden where some goofed by the swing-sets. 

Ryan surprises me when he brings out my bike and I see he has re-taped my handlebars with something brilliant like the grips on the woman's Electra cruiser bike.  It reminds me of a Pucci pattern.

TERRORISTS, INFIDELITY

I fell asleep listening to the evening news.  Two sticky kittens dipped in refined petroleum were found abandoned in the gutters of Taipei.

In my dream, I am perched on a calciferous cliff in San Pedro with my coworker, Uncle F.  We are standing beside his humble, somewhat New English seaside dwelling.  He recounts how his daughter's body was shredded into pieces of detritus by a grenade tossed hastily into the same home by a young terrorist.  I sympathize.  

We crawled on our bellies through subterranean caverns gushing with petroleum.  Above is where irascible terrorists reign.  We crawl into an acquaintance's  small home.  After everyone leaves, I stay and do It with my friend.  It is only afterwards, however, that I remember I am in a relationship. I remember his member is a lesser crimson red.

CRUISE, ACADEMIC LECTURE, BOMB.

My memory begins with a vertical* search for somebody--perhaps somebody Important--inside a lavish vacation cruise ship with chandeliers and sensational staircases.  I remember riding elevators covered in mahogany.  I walk into a darkened lecture room resembling a Spanish-colonial sunroom** where an elegant woman with long brown hair is teaching astronomy.  There is a projector.  My brother's there, so is (a bored) Ryan , as well as some topless collegiate*** boy sporting below-the-knees swimming trunks who shamelessly gropes my legs.  

The subject of the lecture transforms from astronomy to something like A Retrospective: Ethnic Rifts and Civil War in India.  I become a small blonde boy about age 12 flinging molotov cocktails into a gray afternoon, running and hiding for my life... 

*As in I going up then down then up the vessel.

**Like the one from childhood.  La terraza.

***Your cliche.

STROLLING, WAITING.

We were in a group of about +/- 10.

Group noise. 

Languid afternoon just after an indulgent feast.

Broken skies, wet grass, and crisp air.  The way it smells after a gentle tropical shower.

We walked to the family doctor, sitting for hours in a brown and yellow waiting room.  The doctor never arrived.  We leave, and stroll through grass fields flanked by white-washed 12-stories concrete apartments where I took Chinese lessons at Mrs. Zhu's.

We stood below A.H.'s parents' apartment with colorful and brightly lit panelized facades.  They are leaning casually against their balcony, explaining it was they who usurped the doctor away.  Their indifference and inconsideration vexes me.  Someone has a broken hip, you see?

Hi Friends, 

We're back.

WOMAN-KILLER ON THE LOOSE, CITRUS FIELDS

Summer afternoon.

Dust.

Lust.

Lines of orange dwarf trees, perfectly pruned.

Red electric fruit-picking carts with white roofs.  One swerves violently into view, agitating a brown cloud.  Two cops, looking retro and somewhat comedic--except in their own eyes--, don aviators accompanied by ironically misaligned mustaches.  They spill out of the cart: one cop good, the other bad.  The latter chases after a fieldworker in a wife-beater, knocks him over the ground, and threatens to cut the man's throat open.  His cholera is assuaged only by his partner's constant plea to not murder an innocent civilian.  The cop and the wrongfully accused glare at one another in disgust... 

They are looking for my ex-lover who is on a mission of ire to slice me.  The bad cop must really dislike woman-murdering men.

HYDRATE.

It was gray* and there were hills and I was thirsty. I drank glasses and glasses and glasses of water incessantly.

* FUN FACT: GRAY VS. GRAY
Gray: adjective
Grey: verb

NOSE HAIR.

All I remember is: they kept on growing and I kept on trimming away.

HIGH SCHOOL, DEATH BY DROPPING, CHINESE RESTAURANT

I'm in high school again. It's raining and gray. I think I was circling around our library to find parking but there was a school function like a play or a P.T.A. meeting or something. In my dream, space was unnaturally crowded. Then, my mother and brother were hanging precariously onto the edge of a balcony at the school's entrance. I couldn't hold onto them any longer. After a bit of thought and my mother's persistence I decided to fling my body as well into the pit they had fallen into.

I flopped onto a giant egg carton the size of an olympic pool, making a sinister sound like: blop! crunch! My brother had died from the fall. He'd broken his clavicle and bled to death.

Then we went to get some dim sum at a restaurant that once was lacquered red with flowing red curtains. It was softly lit by halogen lamps.

PIZZA, COLLEGE TOWN.

I also explained to M. and R. from the Midnight Ridazz Aids Life Cycle team reasons why I moved to the United States. I was very eloquent and I knew it so I thought it. It was the end of a hot summer day.

NAIL POLISH.

This is all I can remember:

I was shopping at a department store like Wal-mart or Target or something, and it felt the way it does when you're shopping late at night at a chain department store. I felt uneasy; I think it is because I was worried the store might close before I could gather all the items on my list. I browsed through rows of nail polish. I couldn't find the proper color of electric-y/royal purple. Ryan suggested a pearly one with an anemic tinge of purple that almost neared white. I immediately disliked it. Nonetheless, to demonstrate pale colors plus my skin tone equals horse shit, I still applied some on the index and pinky fingernails of my left hand . I said, "See Ryan, this looks like horsehit." He agreed. I used a little acetone to remove the polish but it was stubborn. I must have finished the rest of my shopping excursion with two fingernails still stained pearly like the white, the whites of your e-e-e-eyes.

SEX AND THE BEACH.

Floating in the ocean at night with a lifesaver, like in Titanic.
Then I'm at a beach resort strung with paper lanterns and I'm wearing a very low cut, one-piece swimsuit, with the v-opening slit all the way down to my belly. It is white with puffy meringues and my nipples keep slipping out.

My friend B. begins making passes at me. I find myself kissing her underneath my parent's bed. Since I'm not enjoying this, really, but slightly curious of what it's like to have sex with another girl, I don't find myself plagued with guilt. She gave me short unsatisfying kisses. I only become regretful when I see she has a long flagellating sea weed for a clitoris that slightly resembles some amputated chopstick.

CHLORINE, SWAMP, HOMICIDAL HUSBAND, ENDLESS DOORS TO LOCK

I'm a swim instructor.
Or I'm swimming laps. There are two other girls with black cut-off shirts effortlessly swimming laps as well. We may have exchanged stroking techniques but I may be making this up.

Then I'm home, and I'm married, and I have two children. A teenage boy and a girl who is younger than the boy. It is the end of the day; they are sprawled on our bed in our green room watching end of the day television programs. Have you seen Great Expectations, you know, that film with Gwyneth Paltrow in it, in which the old lady's home is very Victorian Floridian and the color scheme is this deep dusty emerald green a little bloody (metaphorically speaking) but also lush-y on the green spectrum? Well, this is the sort of desolated/isolated swampy setting to which my dream is taking place, with my two-storied home circled by creaky verandas set within a scarlet orange sunset as though the sky were milk stained by very ripened melons.

There was some sort of disagreement with my husband. I know he is demented, so when he flashed an ominous grin, I knew it was best to calmly walk away, panic concealed. I climb a flight of stairs through the back and begin locking our doors. Each door has a small delicate latchkey made of ivory and curved like an abstract question mark or human ear. I can hear his rabietic pants as he tries to beat me to each door. I become more scared as the rattlings become more urgent but the children seem nonchalant their mother is escaping their father like some pathetic prey and continue watching television unaffected.

INVENTORY #3

Downtown Charlottesville, VA with J.W.
In my office. Job applications. Electronically. Ryan too.
According to my co-workers, three things describe Johanna as an employer:

1. Talks too much.
2. Chatty.
3. Talks back.

Naturally, I wasn't hired.

INVENTORY #2

Bike show.
Rain.
Night.
City.
The Westin Bonaventure in Downtown Los Angeles.
Stained glass cylindrical high-rises.
A stressed Chinese schoolgirl ballpointing large dewey eyes in a ruled notebook; homework assignment she hasn't completed before the start of class. She sits next to a uniformed friend on one of those two-personed desks made of wood like the ones we had in Chinese School.

SEA CREATURES, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA/DESIGN SCHOOL, LOOKING AT DEATH FROM ABOVE.

I'm standing at the bow of a yacht with high school friends including W. and L. The midday sun is shinning the way it does in Albert Camus' The Stranger when they stroll behind his mother's corpse for the funeral procession: white blinding heat that inspires choleric languidness. I fall asleep.

When I wake up I find fishes littered on our vessel. They have long torsos (lateral lines) with golden crispy skins that have been lightly breaded and deep fried twice. But they are alive and they sport that generic fishy look with listless, bulging eyes that slightly glimmers panic, and mouths shaped in dumb O's, ready to suck a duck.

Fried living creatures are eerie + repulsive; I do not want them touching me even though W. has assured me they are harmless. I suppose these fishes are like dogs, however, and my fear wafting into their puckering mouths is like heat that activating matter's static particles into microscopic armies of jittery balls. In other words, they glide only towards me. I begin kicking them away. I escape to the inside of the vessel and by the inside I mean it is the dining area of my childhood house with those dark brown cupboards. I'm nauseas. I'm worried they will swallow a leg.

Then I'm flying or driving or walking or gliding through my old college campus. The setting is much less nautical, more terrestrial, more temperate, and more nocturnal. Everything is wet and anything that is green spawns from rich dark soil. I bet I was smelling fresh pine. Nonetheless, I still feel hot + crispy + salty from exorbitant sunbathing. Somebody comments I am unnaturally red. I'm browsing in a library, not at UVa anyway, but in some design school where students are dressed in high-fashion. G. stands behind me with a toothy grin (I think we're boarding the ship together) and begins rubbing my armpits while I surf the internet. He grins, "I can't feel them [my armpits] the way I used to." His audacity and koan-y remark vexes me. But we have to go. On our way to the elevator we pass a table of students who are having a meeting about some student/fashion magazine.

In the elevator, we are with L. G. grabs out a green key/ninja star looking object from his black backpack and strikes the elevator pad three times. He says this will slow down the acceleration of descent, but it actually feels like the reverse, and as we fall faster and faster I think to myself that at least I will now know how I will die. We hit something hard, as though our little elevator were some kind of space-travel vessel exploding through different levels of earth's atmosphere. I feel my body blasting through darkness and debris (in slow motion, of course). I keep expecting something painful will perforate through my body. It is my logic, I suppose, during moments of duress that thinking one step ahead of my own end will make the situation much less miserable.

We do not die. Instead we hit the library again. A sleepy professor wearing a very peculiar gray beanie walks towards me and compliments on my portfolio. We should keep in touch, she says. Another professor, however, with gauzy things and long beautiful peppery dreads explodes into a green wrathful octopus (reminiscent of "The Little Mermaid" where Ursula's anger grows her fat ill-willed tentacles). Some students are bored, others spring in haste for quick escape. There are some flip-flopped chairs. The octopus grabs the three of us instead, devouring us within the caverns of the elevator pit.

INVENTORY.

A dusty room. Of the 70s. Bomchickabowa.

Strips of dark-stained wood veneer.
Shaggy carpet that's nasty.
A sofa; on Craigslist, they call it retro chic.
Brown boxes the kind you get when you're laid off.
Sliding glass door and a sunset like Britney Spear's "I'm a Slave for You" with a splash of mellow yellow bleeding to the insides.j

MEET THE PARENTS.

Card-shufflin'. Bamboo terrace. Slippery hills.

Then, let's go meet Ryan's dad and L too. I tricked my parents. Allegedly, mom had some errands to run, she'll be there in a minute, Alvin will go with her. They're all cross, and if they were stick figurines, their arms would make perfect diagonal braces in little check boxes for those YES/NO questionnaires: Would you like to meet the parents? □YES! xNO!

Three unhappy xNO!'s

In my dream, Ryan's dad just moved to a ranch by the freeway. It's very horizontal and squat and the wood planks are pomegranate stained. Outside is a long stretch of grass the way it was when we first hiked Turnball: Scottish (or as we imagine the Scottish country-scape to be). There is an Olympian-sized pool in the courtyard, but it is too frigid to swim. Everything is new and barren and unsettled in the never-ending rooms painted pink-salmon; plastic sheets, sawdust and dirt still ornament the hardwood floors. They are unleveled.

After peeing I find my dad stir-frying tofu with Ryan's dad, which is a relief because initially he was quiet and difficult. But a rush of festive Chinese couples--you know, the kinds in their 50's or 60's who wear pearls and spritz Chanel No. 5 and wear 2-piece suits with brass cuff-links to even casual occasions such as golf tournaments--come flooding into the pool deck. I become upset because I assume my mother had sabotaged our private soirée by inviting these people. I politely ask them to leave. They ask for directions. I am confused because I'm not very sure where we are so I spit some gibberish about the 605 N connecting to the 60 then the 10 even though we aren't in Whittier at all. By then it is dusk already and the highway moves like molten lava.

Happy Valentines Day, My Dear Reader.j