Then later still, same cycle . . . Back to sleep, then wide awake, and I sat bolt upright from the mattress on the floor. I had no clock, no way of telling night from day, but because there was no excuse left, I started drawing . . . Pen to paper, page sideways, tracing a long curve—deep breath—and every mark I made somehow seemed to drift. I stopped. I got up and paced, I circled my spot in the corner a few times, then dove back into it . . . Because like jumpshots, drawn lines fall and miss . . . And that was my own voice, the little poems I repeated to myself, gritting my teeth, with sweat bursting through pores on my forehead. . . Brick, bounce, slip and bank home—then my pen skipped. I threw it across the room and took another. It wasn't just those girls dancing behind my eyes either. Also that cloudy mess on the paper in front of me, same struggle, the same uphill battle! Then on the other hand was the truth I was actually trying to draw, which I knew meant nothing to anyone, but still so clear, so futile now, and on the page so distant that the act of drawing was like trying to forget.
Benoit was always dropping by, that was the thing and that was always how it started. I'd be in that filthy room, no windows, the walls starting to dome in on me, my heart palpitating but with the magic seeping back into my fingertips . . . I'd be there, pencil in hand, poised over the drawing board when all of a sudden it was Benoit, thooming at the door as if there was an army at his heels. The ludicrous part about it was that we both thought of ourselves as great somethings—as artists—as if all it took was idle curiosity to change one's life. I was worse off than Benoit, in that I felt overwhelmed most of the time and I could never quite settle on what was driving me. Who was Ching Wren? Why did it matter? Who were all these other strobe-lit, invincible Chinese girls we imagined milling around underground, or down on empty dance floors waiting for us? Two douchebags, and yet this was the feeling, the euphoria that carried us out. And that was how we hit the streets, night after night; jogging in matched steps past the old Chinaman with his wooden cart, the benches in the courtyard, past the stone Buddha and out with a flourish onto the sidewalk to a soundtrack of trilled saxophones.
That particular night I'd just woken up when Benoit came crashing in, slamming the door shut . . . Then, again later, in the dead hours, beating with his fists, shouting at me through the door because I'd remembered to throw the bolt:
"HER HANDSOME AMERICAN FRIENDS! That's what they said, pal, and that's us! C'mon, I can hear you breathing! Blue! Blue, pal, get up! We've gotta get down there! Blue! Listen! This is no time to start acting funny . . ."
Instead I drew until the walls of Jericho seemed to crash down around me, until my hands trembled and I could no longer think. Then I pushed the drawing board aside and moved about the room in a daze. I gulped the strains from a half-crushed can of soda. I turned on Malasian Strike Force, then clicked it off again. By now Benoit was on some couch somewhere smothered in ass, and the fact that this, what I was doing, seemed like the high road was no great relief. But Benoit wasn't the problem . . . I felt like screaming, breaking something, but instead I unclipped my drawing book from the board, flung open the door and stormed into the hallway. That soft, tropical sigh of rain on the roof, down the walls in pipes. Same cycle, same lump in my throat. And after a few tries I was able to snap free the rusted latch and hurl the book down through the open window.
