WEST KOWLOON
Click here to listen to the accompanying sound piece by George Branda (IG: @G_brandaa)
I stared at the onslaught of neon signs, winking and delirious. They made the street, which snaked up a hill flanked by buildings, resemble a stream of HTML-code. I’d taken 350mg of pregabalin, Seb had taken 550, and we had shared an energy drink. We were headed to a costume party in Tsim Sha Tsui, which, after much discussion, we agreed would be a good place to find something else to do. I was dressed as Maggie Cheung’s character from In The Mood For Love. The collar of my cheap Qipao had begun to chafe against my neck. Seb wore a cowboy hat, boots, and a hoodie, with a flannel shirt peaking out from beneath. He was supposed to be an outlaw. It had been an hour or so since we’d taken the drugs and though Seb insisted he could not feel them yet, I noticed a slight blurriness to my vision, as well as an increased sense of tactile pleasure. I petted the sleeve of my mink-coat as we walked. The lights seemed to be losing their detail, as if their resolution had been scaled down, and the buildings seemed as haphazard and accidental as cast dice. Many were netted in bamboo and others had green tarps draped over them. In some places, the street would narrow, and I had the impression that the buildings were leaning into each other, as if tête-à-tête. If I were sober, I thought, I might have felt claustrophobic, but instead I felt drowsy and comfortable, though my shoes had begun to pinch and the sidewalk, as I’d been thinking about sensations and lighted signs, had swollen with people, who made themselves impossible to maneuver around. Seb flitted in and out of my peripheral vision, his head weaving between passersby, and I realized that neither of us had said a word to each other in the last ten minutes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think that pregabalin stuff messes with my stomach though. Might need to stop at 7/11 for something to eat.” he replied.
I nodded. “Hmm. I wouldn’t eat now. It will ruin the come-up.”
“Should we redose?”
“Later,” I said, “let’s wait ‘til we get there. I don’t want my legs giving out.” In those days, I was still calling him my brother, to make things easier. The truth is, we had met through a mutual friend, whom I had been on a few dates with, when I had first moved to Hong Kong, a couple months back. Our meeting was then, in a sense, inorganic, as neither of us had any overlapping interests or circles, aside from that one friend. But explaining all of that felt convoluted, and when I imagined hearing the story from an outsider’s perspective, I felt like I’d be very bored. Neither of us had any reason to be where
we were, so in that sense he was my brother, because, like a brother, he was bound to me by circumstance.
For the past month, we’d been buying up pregabalin, xanax, lorazepam, codeine, and various pharmaceutical opiates, from a pharmacy in Mong Kok that was disreputable enough to sell practically anything without requiring a prescription. We were reselling the drugs at an outrageously inflated price to tourists and exchange students. We were both twenty-three, or twenty-four, somewhere around there. Our nails were bitten-down and our lips were perpetually chapped. We took drugs every day. We’d both overstayed our student visas and were looking for work, in Hong Kong or elsewhere. We knew we would not always have each other. We had nothing to do and we were headed nowhere, and in some ways, I thought he was the most beautiful, complete man I had ever met.
We lived together in a tiny apartment in Yuen Long, where we fought, cried, laughed, slept, and watched TV, all while crushing, swallowing, parachuting, and snorting whatever we could find. High out of our minds, we’d concoct ideas and plans without follow-through. Once, we’d scored some MDMA that turned out to be speed, and spent the night trying to invent a new color. The comedowns were the worst. We occupied opposite ends of the room, sometimes sitting, other times pacing, most of the time just lying down, feeling guilty and frightened, wondering what the hell was wrong with us. We might have known at one time, but it’d been so long, we’d forgotten.
We were just leaving the pharmacy where we’d picked up five or six boxes of 150 milligram capsules of pregabalin. Our friend was willing to trade us two grams of cocaine for one box, which was a steal on our end, considering a single box cost us a quarter of what a gram of good cocaine went for. We assumed we’d be able to sell a few at the party. We’d dipped into one of the boxes, promising ourselves we’d only use a few strips. We had to be careful with the dosage. 800 milligrams was perfect, the world became large and dark, and unfamiliar, yet somehow comforting, like getting a hug from a shadow. Over 1000 meant a blueish face, a slack jaw, and a seizure. Death was rare, but you ran the risk of brain damage, or worse, getting arrested. You had to be careful not to forget how much you’d taken. I’d gotten into the habit of drawing tally-marks on the inside of my wrist. I kept a pen in the pocket of my coat. Black ink was smeared all over my fingers. Seb chose red, which was a bad omen for Chinese people, I told him, but he didn’t care. His red hands peeked out from his sleeves. Around us, the streetlights had begun to undress the dark, and everything seemed impossibly warm and easy.
An old woman, frail and bug-eyed, approached us. She pawed at Seb, her hands shriveled and spindly, like pale spiders. She was saying something in Cantonese, it sounded like a plea. He instinctively backed away.
“What do you think she wants?" he asked me, I did not know.
A young woman, who had been standing nearby, said in English, “leave her alone. Don’t talk. Just go.”
I turned to her. “Do you know what she wants? Does she need help?”
The old woman was now clinging to Seb. Her grey hair seemed to be bandaged onto her scalp. She looked like a worn-out teddy bear.
The young woman just shook her head.
“Don’t help.”
“Why not?”
She shook her head again, before muttering something in Cantonese. She took out her phone from her purse then typed something into Google Translate. She showed the screen to me.
SHE IS AN ADDICT. JUST LEAVE.
I looked back at the old woman, whose jacket had fallen to reveal a network of brown sores riddling her arms. I thought of the boxes in Seb’s backpack. Had she seen us come out from the pharmacy and followed us from there? Or did she see something in our faces, a kind of “takes one to know one?” Or was it that we were visibly foreign? Or, more than likely, was there no logic to it at all?
The young woman began typing again.
JUST GO. SHE IS A KNOWN ADDICT IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. NOT WORTH IT.
We’d forgotten where we were supposed to be going.
“Should we take the train?” Seb asked. I nodded.
On the way to the MTR, we stopped at a 7/11 and I bummed a smoke off of a rough-looking man in gym shorts and slides. Seb and I sat on the curb and talked about the girl he had recently stopped seeing. I asked him what had happened between them. “Well, there’s just never been a girl I’ve wanted to get to know.”
“That’s sad.”
“Maybe. I think it suits me just fine, for now. I’m young.”
“Don’t you want someone though? Someone to make you better?”
“I don’t think any relationship has made me better.”
“I think it should. I think partners should always make you better.”
“And friends?”
“I think friends can make you worse,” I replied.
“Yeah, true.”
“I can’t think of any friend who has made me better.”
“You make me the same, I think. Like nothing changes.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “I guess it's the same for me.”
“We have absolutely no effect on each other either way.”
“Zero minus zero.”
“Yep.”
On a wall inside the station, I noticed an advertisement. It featured a gigantic lobster, cartoonishly red, holding a sign in its claw.
“You know lobsters live forever,” I said.
Seb laughed.
“That’s a misconception. Nothing lives forever.”
“Well lobsters do.”
He shook his head.
“Lobsters are biologically immortal. They create perfect copies of their cells. It’s not the same as living forever. Too much energy is spent molting and growing a new shell, that’s what kills them.”
“They’re too exhausted from changing.”
“Something like that.”
“What if scientists could, like, I don’t know, assist them? So they don’t spend as much energy.”
“They would still die. Their outsides would get too big, but their insides, like their organs and stuff, would stay the same. They wouldn’t be able to support them anymore.” I watched the long metallic braid of the escalator descend. It looked at least a mile long. I thought of my life stretching out. I knew I wanted something different, yet, suddenly and without notice, this life had installed itself, and bricked all the doors to other lives shut. I could not see an exit. This life had grown a spine, organs, a heart which pumped dark blood, a skin had hardened around it. My life had taken shape and walked on without me. “Have you ever heard of Tithonos?” I asked, after we’d stepped inside the train.
He shook his head.
“There’s this Greek myth about this guy who asks the gods for immortality, but he forgets to ask for eternal youth.”
“And so what happens to him?”
“So then his life stretched out on and on while he just kept getting older and older.”
We exited the station, right near Chungking Mansions. We had forgotten the name of the street we were supposed to be on. We walked along the harbor, lost and dreaming. The ships glided upon the water, their white sails bloomed like lotus flowers. Seb was sighing. The wind lapped at my face. Tourists were taking photos. I wondered if we would be in any of them.
We stopped in an antique shop, which was still open though it must have been nearly ten or eleven. By now, we were stumbling, I leaned into Seb as I walked, trying to make sense of the boxes of fine china and trinkets. A small, shriveled, old woman, with a head of nice white hair, sat behind the cash register. I picked up a replica model Boeing. Seb inspected a wooden carving of a horse.
“I’ve always wanted to buy this kind of stuff,” he said.
“Me too. But I’ve never stayed in one place long enough to really decorate.” “Yeah. My room right now looks like a hospital,” he joked.
I laughed, “mine too. But I like hospitals.”
“Me too.”
Upon a shelf, between boxes of coil-incense and metal flowers, sat a porcelain hand, its palm facing upwards. I picked it up.
“We should buy something,” Seb said.
“Mhm. But we don’t know where we’ll be in the next few months.”
“Yeah, but that’s exactly why we need to buy something. We have to start investing in our lives, like, treating things as permanent, even if we know they really aren't.” He grabbed a blue bowl from an adjacent shelf.
“I’m gonna buy this. You buy that. That’s gonna be a start.”
I turned to look at him, and as I did, the hand’s fingers slipped from mine, and it tumbled, before shattering upon the floor, nearly missing my shoes. He helped me gather the pieces. I didn’t have cash on me, so he paid 30 Hong Kong dollars to the shopkeeper, who gingerly folded the bills into her hand, as if she were afraid they might break too. He left the bowl behind.
At the party, we met a bunch of people we’d never seen before, who all seemed to recognize us. One of them, a girl called Queenie, threw her arms around my neck. Her jeans were slung low at her hips and her wrists were hung with huge silver bangles, which rattled as she hugged me. A jade pendant sat nestled between her breasts. She gave me a gummy smile, revealing a gap that split her two front teeth. She proceeded to kiss the air beside my cheeks, with a thick smacking noise. I instinctively recoiled. She was so close I could smell her breath, which was acrid yet sweet, almost like a spiced wine.
“You’re French right?” She asked, giggling.
I wasn’t.
“Yes.”
Her eyes were perfect, so large and so black, and her skin was so tan it seemed to be lit up from the inside. Pregabalin made everyone beautiful. Later, someone at the party would tell me she was the daughter of a cop.
We went to a club. I didn’t remember leaving the party. I was looking for Seb, groping blindly in the fogged up dark, until I found him with his face bent over the bathroom counter, a bill rolled beneath his nose. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost his cowboy hat. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. We spent a while there talking, though we had nothing to talk about. I struggled to take my lines, both my nostrils were clogged. I had to gum the last one. Cold spread over my jaw, followed by an absence of feeling so profound, it was almost painful. A white substance clung to the corners of my mouth. Seb was laughing, everything was funny to him that night. I guarded the coke from his breath with my hand. He had gotten a new piercing that morning, a thin trail of blood slid from the top of his right ear. The clean, white, feeling of cocaine had given way to something awful and vulgar. I felt dirty, blemished in some way, my nose oozed, my teeth chattered. The coke was speedy. Everything felt sharp. I asked Seb if we had more pregabalin to take the edge off. He told me we’d sold it all, how could I forget?
“To who?”
He rolled his eyes. “Queenie, remember?”
“Her dad’s a cop,” I said, but he’d already stopped listening. He looked translucent, as if I could reach right through him.
We bought nitrous balloons from the bar. We found an empty booth and sat beside one another. We held the nozzles to our lips, then inhaled simultaneously. My vision faltered. A
warmth bloomed from behind my eyes. I leaned my entire weight against Seb. The thudding of my heart calmed. It was all just chemical, I thought. All of this. Both the dirtiness I’d felt before, and the calm I felt then. Chemicals had names, compounds, and shapes. They could
be drawn, categorized, changed, created and destroyed. Everything was chemical.This notion excited me. It was bliss. We headed to the dance-floor, and the song that was playing was beautiful and felt like it would never end. It thickened around me, lifted my arms, and carried me away.
Then we were in a bar, which appeared to be closed, playing mahjong with strangers. Cigarette smoke veiled our faces. The tiles were scattered across the table. The characters seemed to glow, imbued with some strange, otherworldly magic that frightened me. Someone bought us a round. People were always buying us rounds. A fight nearly broke out. Lots of shouting. Guttural voices gushed around us, but as always, nothing touched us. We were just passing through. A Russian man began picking at his cuticles with a pocket-knife, flicking hard white chunks of dead skin upon the floor. Seb said we better go. Outside, the sky had lightened without us noticing. I felt the softness of the morning. The street seemed to ripple. Cabs surged past, their horns as loud as a gunshot. Each tower demanded our attention. On one of them, huge block letters shimmered, reading:“HONG KONG: WHERE EAST MEETS WEST.”
“What does that even mean?” Seb asked, laughing.
I heard Queenie went to prison a few months later. I’d moved away by then. I wondered if her father was there in the courtroom. I wondered if he’d been the one to call it in. I remembered her telling me, that night at the party, with a huge, excited grin, that she’d been accepted into NYU.
“These next few years, well, they’re going to be the best years of my life.”
In many ways, Hong Kong was like a new frontier. People could strike it rich, then lose it all just as quickly. New money shone from the LV-monogrammed handbags, the gold-leafed bellies of the Buddhas, the sharp manicured nails, the silver rolexes that gleamed from the wrists of financiers. Luck was all around, and so was superstition. No red ink or fourth floors. Apartment complexes shaped like arches, so that spirits could fly through. The stalls under the bridge in Wan Chai, clouded with incense, where villains are beaten and blessings are given. Fate lurks at every corner. The briefcases full of cash tucked between
knees on the bus to Macau. The men who stand outside of Chungking Mansions, with their siren-song of cocaine and hashish. The bank towers that are shaped like blades, to slice the competition’s earnings in half. The bars, filled with old men, who shout obscenities at a television screen, cursing the unlucky horse galloping down the track in Happy Valley. The expats and their mistresses. The street market near Yau Ma Tei, tables laden with memorabilia—Mao’s little red book, posters promising a better world, flanked by fake jade bracelets and sex toys. The women who only emerge at night, in the shadow of a stairwell, wasp-waisted and pale, teetering in high-heels, their mouths painted red. The glittering arcades, claw-machines, and blind-boxes香港—fragrant harbor, where opportunity comes and goes, as ships do.
That night, before the drugs made it hard to talk, we sat on a residential rooftop in Jordan, our legs dangling out over the city.
Seb was obsessed with the skyscrapers. He kept saying they looked like phones. “Everything is so new here,” he was saying, “but the kind of new that feels unfinished, like it’s under construction all the time. I feel like it drives people crazy.” “I thought newness was supposed to be good,” I said. “Like, futuristic.” He smiled, “Yes, sometimes. But other times, it’s like being lost at sea. You’re just drifting, blindly, without a past to anchor you.”
“So that’s what we are, then. Just drifting.”
“Yeah, something like that. It’s not so bad though.”
I agreed, at that moment, it didn’t feel so bad.
I lost touch with Seb after I moved. I thought of calling him but never did. Even if I’d tried, I wasn’t sure he’d pick up, and then all of the sudden it’d been years and with our constant moving I was sure he’d changed his phone number. Occasionally, I’d get the urge to look him up, but I preferred the mystery, for at any moment we could be in the same city, walking the same streets, and pass each other by. But honestly, I don’t think of him that often. Life can sometimes be that way.
(Sound link pasted in full here for convenience: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UvStoz4LTqzy7IglFLK30PaIuyRYsraI/view?usp=sharing )