2046½, Chapter 2

Still want some feedback on this. Anybody there? -SR

My watch beeps at midnight. Break is over. I get up from the closed toilet seat and stash my notebook behind me under my shirt. It’s time once again to serve drinks for Jamaica Night patrons at Curitiba-R in Wan Chai.

I could write in the lounge section of Curitiba-R, but I tend to write better when it is quieter, and the restroom muffles the infectiously dancable music. The only nagging concern is for me to write in a nonrhythmic fashion in order to suggest to passers by that I am not masturbating in the stall. This is a unisex restroom after all, and I need to show a bit decency.

The hinges squeak as I open the stall door. The lights over the mirror burn my eyes for a bit. I fix myself up in front of the mirror, take a tag from my shirt pocket labeled “Teddy” with “西奥多” below it, and pin it on. As I step away from the mirror, I notice a woman drying herself off on the wall blower. I can tell from the window that It was raining not long ago. Women don’t usually come to the club with business suits on. She’s probably a yuppie coming straight from work, or from sitting around looking for work, or from just sitting around. Whatever the case, she obviously has enough money to come to an expensive place like this.

Egad, brain! Brownish red is a nice color for a suit like that. I’m not sure what that color is really called, but it looks like red wine. It matches the tips of her hair and her mocha skin. The British DNA in me describes her as quite dashing. I check her out from the corner of my eye as I walk out of the bathroom.

The music fades in as I enter the lounge. I dance and strut my way through the crowd on my way to the counter. I like the slow, reflective tempos of dub music. It may be dubstep actually. I can’t tell. Some dub fans I talked with from Beijing have a name for the euphoric feeling you get from this music; Bái Rè Shēn. I slow down for a while to digest the music before I open the counter hatch, and finally get to business at hand.

Mr. 7+7 looks Indian. his suit looks quite old fashioned, and he is quite out of place here. He dances by pointing his finger up and down. Where the hell did his dance come from? Mr. Black-Tooth Grin, an American, discusses politics. He still believes that the whole “checks and balances” thing still works. I explain to him “If a political system expects the worst out of people, it produces leaders with bad values, until it collapses. Oops! I hope he doesn’t take “collapse” as a reference to the war going on in the States.”Uh…under the weight of corporations” I added. Whew!

I thought how I argued was kind of odd. I guess that’s the Party’s way of influencing us since the Reunification. Given last-minute negotiations, they decided to leave Hong Kong’s law and economy as it was. But their rhetoric seeps in through the official media. Oddly, I trust it more than the privately-funded media in Hong Kong. A couple of weeks ago, as I was surfing the corporate channels, A member in a discussion panel suggested something along the line of Premier Zhang having the hots for Bogata-Lima Axis President Juanita Torres. His evidence? A video still of Zhang with an erection as he shakes hands with the old woman. I knew the erection was fake because I saw the same picture before on the CNN feeds when they reported on the World Social Conference, sans erection.

Ms. Sangría…Hey! It’s the quite dashing woman from the bathroom. Before I give her the glass of sangría, I ask over the music “What  is that color you are wearing?”.

“It’s called burgundy”. The sangría matches her whole outfit. 

“Wow, I guess you like the color burgundy. You know, with the red wine and everything”.

“Spot on…” she pauses to squint at my tag “See…Ow…Dow. Is that right? Or should I just call you Teddy?”

“Teddy is fine.”

“My name is Farah, I heard about this place from my new boss upstairs.”
 
“You work at Vissel-Mustaili?”

“Yep. Legal counsel. Money’s not much, but it’s good for anyone straight out of law school.” So she is a yuppie. I was right.

“I guess we’ll meet a lot from now on, Teddy”. She fishes into a pocket on her jacket and takes out a pen and card.  She writes something on one side of the card as she holds it up on her flat hand, flips the card over, and gives it to me faced forward.  “My personal number is the one on the left-hand corner.” I notice most the text is in burgundy except for the familiar green VM logo consisting of a pair of chevrons. One chevron for the V. The other with vertical lines attached, forming an M.

“I’m sorry if it seems like I’m rushing out too soon, but it is only Tuesday.” She waves me goodbye and walks a couple of steps away before I turn the card over and read what she wrote.

“Think of me next time you’re in the stall.”