couldn't bring the columns down

ursha is my favourite dealer at the empire cardroom. she is tall and efficient, has a pretty face despite the traces of angular slovenian features (i prefer a softer bone structure), and most importantly, speaks in that sexy kgb accent when she's berating a player for acting out of turn or calling a waiter to bring me a latte when she notices me yawning at the table. ('pedro, could you bring this nice young gentleman a coffee...') because i appreciate her slavic crispness and high cheekbones i tip her slightly more than i do the other dealers; when i finally stood up at the end of my fourteen hour marathon, i tipped her five pounds from my monstrous stack of twelve hundred and fifty. it occurred to me as i stumbled to the cash desk while rob the floor manager spread a beautiful scarlet fan of fifty pound notes across the counter that i had been seated at a poker table with what counts for a month's salary for some. rather than be frightened or alarmed, i felt as if i had been injected with a hard shot of adrenaline. i have played no limit hold'em at the empire casino for ten days for roughly an average of eight hours a day. my profit is approximately three thousand pounds sterling. this is a win rate of three hundred pounds per day. my only regret now is that i did not begin destroying the competition closer to the end of michaelmas.

for destruction is indeed the order of the day on the green (in the case of the empire, black) felt. when asked what i love most about poker i waffle slightly about its complex web of decision-making, excitement of making money on my own and so on, but always come back to that core idea, the fire in the furnace, the fuel in the engine; the systematic annihilation of my opponents, the crushing of their spirit. my skill edge over most of the casual gamblers who wander into the poker room is significant, but to win the most money you have to press on the softest spots, and early on you learn to identify those who not only clearly have too much money but a gambling addiction to boot. david, a middle eastern businessman in his fifties, seems permanently drunk, loves to laugh and have a good time. he calls every female he sees 'darling' and tells the table unironically that he is setting the rest of us a good example on how to treat women. i befriended him quickly, and made vague protestations when he declaimed to the rest of the table that at first he thought i was just a young man, but began to have some respect for me when he realised that i was not a 'hubbly-bubbly' (???) player, but a 'professional'. our 'friendship' was to be short-lived. i enjoyed his company but it was his endless roll of bills that i was after. over the three or four days i had known david i had taken at least one grand off him, and things came to an abrupt end when i checked my straight on the turn and he flung five twenty-five pound chips into a seventy-five pound pot holding a meagre pair of queens, clearly putting me on a flush draw. the moment i muttered, somewhat sheepishly, that i was raising him all-in, he angrily shoved his remaining one hundred into the middle, shouted 'i told you not to come to this table! you always beat me!' and stormed out of the casino without bothering to see a meaningless three of diamonds fall on the river. i have not seen him since. that has been the theme these past two weeks. knowing that i had used deception and superior skill to frustrate and stymie these scores of middle aged men in their work shirtsleeves; did they really think swimming with the sharks would be a good way to unwind after a long day? by the end of most nights i had so much of their hard earned money i could not even close my wallet.

i have a real poker bankroll now; i just need to spin my five thousand up to around ten thousand, and i can make the move from the empire in leicester square to the palm beach in mayfair, where the real high rollers frequent, and the game is bigger, and more real. if i succeed there, then this game which i started playing in my army days will have become something else altogether. from penny-ante on kitchen countertops and mahjong tables in bukit timah to the casinos of london. let's hope i'm not just a lucky kid on a heater. 

even after everything it's still happenstance that gets me

the problem here, said zoe, is that you have an accent. and most received pronunciation accents - the bbc kind - carry very well in a theatre because the ends of most words are emphasised clearly. and we don't want you to change your accent, but we do want you to slightly emphasise more - not by too much, but enough so you can be heard clearly. zoe scares me a little, so everything she says i take straight to the heart, where it lingers. despite my insistence to francesca that i don't have an accent - pretensions to a neutral, unaccented english - i know that whatever the case when my character gets emotional, i start to speed up, and i start to lose the ends of my words, and if i get too harried i start to stumble over my lines. i don't want to mess up in front of the people in this room, because to be honest they all scare me a little. my directors: zoe with her intense middle eastern beauty, cut-glass vowels and steely, certain direction; jordan's expressive northern brogue and ability to instantly replicate emotions i take five tries to approximate, and my stage-wife, posh and pretty sophie who encases herself in elegance, too much the icy english rose for me to be really comfortable around her. i don't know how i managed to land the role of the male lead on my first audition in oxford, but i know there's a lot at stake. the press preview for broken stars is in 4 days. this is the biggest and most complex role i've ever had to do, and i'm scared. 

how to describe oxford? three hours before i was due to fly for heathrow i was still at the ccab basketball courts, playing pickup with my erstwhile friends, trying to cram in the few things i loved about singapore that i would not get before i became another person. that's what this has been about. because things have been the same, but different. shuffling chips at the fox poker club in london, because money won is sweetest wherever you go. turning the corner to somerville quad, which i think will always be breathtaking. late night pizza with francesca, julia, and harry, trying to untangle the thousand-year old intricacies of roman law; clubbing at park end, with my friends all about me. shivering in the wind under lamplight despite the embrace of a cigarette. how could i be happier? everything stretches before me. i learned my mistakes now and i'm somewhere where i won't let anyone or anything hurt me. there. i said i would find it. it was worth the wait. 

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn’t rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. 

As it is, I can’t settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy. 

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.

-- Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit


justin's audi speeding down the road while we turn his front windows into twin chimneys, those dunhills giving us the stopgap in conversation and the journey in the midst of traffic jams, or during lulls in the night. there's something odd about sucking smoke in a car, but his ipod playlist, titled 'partycar', makes it more at home, that 808 beat, that sick bassline, (your daddy musta been a drug dealer) that smooth whirring german engine gliding us across the tarmac, (why?) rich socialites in the backseat talking their last-night-gossip-trash, (cos you dope) let me pretend i'm a thousand simulacra of myself, that foolish real deal, the boy who swapped his books for cigarettes. i turned them into a drink accompaniment, gulping down that isotonic taste in camp which turned the smoke hundred-plus salty-sweet, or sipping apple juice to tinge that spongy white filter with an aftertaste of acid, or in the enveloping darkness around my estate clutching a lowball glass filled with milk, flavouring my nicotine shot with childhood and froth. fragrant liquids and poisonous gas, mix in equal parts every night, for a few guaranteed seconds of forgetfulness. i extinguish them into the stone drain, the concrete tablet walls. i too was demolished, turned to ash for years and years and only the wind whistled and took notice

on the brink, the cusp, four weeks to lift off, come on jian yang, let's see if you still remember how to fly

we are talking in the hermetic air of his apartment, where the shut windows and slow airconditioning have dragged the oxygen to a standstill, with that infernal half-light of six am creeping up the sky, claiming back the cover of night. under that blanket we played poker in a full ten-player game til four, and once everyone left we played an intense heads up game for two hours, where a series of unlucky hands culminating in me drawing to a higher broadway straight on the river besting his lower straight netting me a seventy-five dollar profit. my vastly superior luck just won me another three hundred online; picture me hunched over my computer, listening to justin timberlake, clicking buttons with hand probabilities racing through my head. poker electrifies me with a stream of numbness and focus; fills my body and mind with a single-minded preoccupation that chases out the demons, the things that make me weak. it's the numbers that help me draw these clear lines. either you have it or you don't; either you have this or you don't. i'll win this much, i won't. it's what i need; to walk in a labyrinth of solid walls and hard turns, only i can see through the brick, three or four corridors deep.

few weeks back, tai boon left for harvard; hong chen and i loitered around the airport waiting for him to leave, watching him talk to a section-strength of loyal firefighters and a small gaggle of old friends who came to see him off. he left for boston without a glance back. yarn left for canberra, too, and i remember watching some of my old classmates pass through the departure gate, bound for le havre. each time i got off the train at changi station i realised that like all things the airport has lost its gilded sheen, its lustre. i was waiting too long, i lost my momentum, and now my flight is in danger of turning into terminal velocity. as always the old themes surface, shaking off dust motes, heavy-lidded sleepy eyes, but still shambling towards me. could you tell me how to how to expunge all this grey; i want the things i dropped back. tell me how to weather these days, yamagata days, days of dissolution and smoke. i wanted to try all these new things but i can't now, i folded it, the best hand, the ace of spades and the queen of hearts. the two prettiest cards in the deck.

it started out benign. i was walking in the woods and the sun beat down on me like its rays were solid columns of heat and i knew that i would never feel that lost again, with that wicked steel rifle barrel grazing my waist like i wanted it there, that's so lost already but of course i was wrong. you can be more lost. these were the layers that wound themselves about what i was looking for like lengths and lengths of muslin wrapped tight, i couldn't see through them, me walking through the woods, sitting in the dark, searching for a spark above the night lights from my window, they wrapped the cloth so tight i couldn't even see backwards. if you can't see backwards you can't tell when you're dropping things, leaving them behind. it started out benign but it started to metastasize, spread through my body and pretended it was something good, but really its malignance was always there, i was just too blind to see it. walking in the woods looking for the faded signboards, the checkpoints, so we could tell where we were. the blind leading the blind, going up and up a papier-mâché tower we spun for ourselves. dropping our cares behind us on the path like gumdrops, like breadcrumbs, the carapace around the heart. imagining it pink and raw, divested of its armour. trying to shield its thin valves, growing new layers, translucent and feeble, then giving up halfway. so where do we go from here? look down from my chewed paper perch. look down at the treetops and the forest pathways and the thousand soldiers like little ants. the blind leading us in darkness. the pathetic trail behind us we can't even see. what was it all for? could you find me a cure for cancer? a way to reach oblivion? a way to blot out the stars, a way to desiccate the sea. the streams of acrid smoke i blew out of my body trying to get rid of everything else inside. to empty me, the way to peace. this is me wearing my rue with a difference. this is me looking about for all the ways back to the start.

but now it's oblivion i want

'this is a chemist,' he said, handing me a crimson draught, we had smoked outside and the white boys were kissing the chinese girls and were fucking with their clothes on to the beat. that whole table hates me, he said, and i said how many of the models have you had sex with? all, he said. here we all are making a farce of romance (kiss her hard), come on sugar, just twine and lock your tongues, i just need to crush myself, it was a conflagration, bury me, and never let me out.

Close your eyes. A lover is standing too close
to focus on. Leave me blurry and fall toward me
with your entire body. Lie under the covers, pretending
to sleep, while I’m in the other room. Imagine
my legs crossed, my hair combed, the shine of my boots
in the slatted light. I’m thinking My plant, his chair,
the ashtray that we bought together. I’m thinking This is where
we live. When we were little we made houses out of
cardboard boxes. We can do anything. It’s not because
our hearts are large, they’re not, it’s what we
struggle with. The attempt to say Come over. Bring
your friends. It’s a potluck, I’m making pork chops, I’m making
those long noodles you love so much. My dragonfly,
my black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen are singing
for blood, but we are the crossroads, my little outlaw,
and this is the map of my heart, the landscape
after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is
a tenderness, which is a room, a lover saying Hold me
tight, it’s getting cold. We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it. The lawn drowned, the sky on fire,
the gold light falling backward through the glass
of every room. I’ll give you my heart to make a place
for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger.
Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars
for you? That I would take you there? The splash
of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube? We’ve read
the back of the book, we know what’s going to happen.
The fields burned, the land destroyed, the lovers left
broken in the brown dirt. And then it’s gone.
Makes you sad. All your friends are gone. Goodbye
Goodbye. No more tears. I would like to meet you all
in Heaven. But there’s a litany of dreams that happens
somewhere in the middle. Moonlight spilling
on the bathroom floor. A page of the book where we
transcend the story of our lives, past the taco stands
and record stores. Moonlight making crosses
on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.
We have been very brave, we have wanted to know
the worst, wanted the curtain to be lifted from our eyes.
This dream going on with all of us in it. Penciling in
the bighearted slob. Penciling in his outstretched arms.
Our father who art in Heaven. Our father who art buried
in the yard. Someone is digging your grave right now.
Someone is drawing a bath to wash you clean, he said,
so think of the wind, so happy, so warm. It’s a fairy tale,
the story underneath the story, sliding down the polished
halls, lightning here and gone. We make these
ridiculous idols so we can get to what’s behind them,
but what happens after we get up the ladder?
Do we simply stare at what’s horrible and forgive it?
Here is the river, and here is the box, and here are
the monsters we put in the box to test our strength
against. Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here’s
the desire to put it inside us, and then the question
behind every question: What happens next?
The way you slam your body into mine reminds me
I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling,
and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding
the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t
stitched up quite right, the place they could almost
slip right into through if the skin wasn’t trying to
keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side
of the theater where the curtain keeps rising.
I crawled out the window and ran into the woods.
I had to make up all the words myself. The way
they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed
through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled
around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made
this place for you. A place for you to love me.
If this isn’t a kingdom then I don’t know what is.
So how would you catalog it? Dawn in the fields?
Snow and dirty rain? Light brought in in buckets?
I was trying to describe the kingdom, but the letters
kept smudging as I wrote them: the hunter’s heart,
the hunter’s mouth, the trees and the trees and the
space between the trees, swimming in gold. The words
frozen. The creatures frozen. The plum sauce
leaking out of the bag. Explaining will get us nowhere.
I was away, I don’t know where, lying on the floor,
pretending I was dead. I wanted to hurt you
but the victory is that I could not stomach it. We have
swallowed him up, they said. It’s beautiful. It really is.
I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room
where everyone finally gets what they want.
You said Tell me about your books, your visions made
of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is
the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you
there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar
cube… We were in the gold room where everyone
finally gets what they want, so I said What do you
want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am
leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome
burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,
my silent night, just mash your lips against me.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

-- Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain



 'if only,' said jingwei, 'you could do something about your face.' i was trying to romanticise, but this noisy and excitable chinese marmot who had begun following me around was making a huge dent in my sepia-scenemaking. we sat together on a stony ledge, overlooking a twinkling, torch-lit colosseum, and let our three-year long argument waft through the balmy roman night; her keeping up the patter of gentle abuse, my careless ripostes, your eyebrows are so ugly! well at least i'm not a fucking crazy bitch. can't you go and trim them!! shut the fuck up. no girl is ever going to want you with eyebrows like that!!! jetlagged and slightly withdrawn, we had stumbled through the day's heat, trudging through the flavian amphitheatre trading wilted barbs before collapsing on a green lawn in palatine hill, sweat gluing me to the grass, eyelids bathed in gold, and slept for an hour. for food it was gelato, breakfast gelato, second breakfast gelato, brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, supper all gelato, swathing my tongue in those crazy lemony lemon flavours, hazelnut rich thick chocolate sending shots of liquid crack pure pleasure to my brain, shoveling down sticky cannoli and tiny tarts packed so full of glistening rainbow fruits they burst in your mouth like tropical punch, turning away from each parlour with an ice-cream cup in my hand and another in jingwei's, then turning back in three minutes for another because we finished it too fast, waking up in the middle of the night in our cramped china hostel rooms and deciding to embark on an expedition in search of strawberry melon crushed ice and exquisite cream twirled on a cone. on occasion we sat in small homely italian restaurants, eating elastic delicious pizza and realising that eggy thick carbonara in italy was not the pastamania white milky carbonara i had wolfed down with such relish next to justin in camp; late into the night, because dinner here starts at nine, i drink carafe after carafe of expensive water while jingwei indulges in her raillery: can you take care of your skin?!! you're damn useless jianyang!!! you look like a lumberjack!!!!

夜景, or the night scenery, is my priority upon return to the city of lights, and within the first day i have found it; kenneth and i ascend the steps to the basilique sacre-coeur at montmartre, turn around, and find the city's natural and vast french windows to beauty, thrown wide open to look out upon the rooftops of paris as l'orange setting sun crept across, claiming each building, until a deep purple had descended, a royal velvet night. we sit on the steps, buy cheap heinekens while watching the resident 50 cent lookalike work his magic with a soccer ball, and marvel at the impossible beauty of parisian girls as they walk by, unaware of the spell they cast. walking behind the church we find a little outdoor theatre where, to round off their short performance, the cast and crew run into the audience and invite them down to the stage for an impromptu dance party. paris is one of the most beautiful cities i have ever seen; each street corner, baroque streetlamp, road crossing, benefits from the fresh light streaming in through the trees, and i'm thinking, if i lived here, how easy it would be to see my spirits lifted each morning, no need for any internal emotional rallies, just a foot on the pavement, the air in my lungs, and a song (paris, paris) in my heart. i fall asleep on the grass outside les invalides, watch the eiffel tower light up - a steel girder studded with christmas bulbs flashing on a cloudy evening - stroll by the seine, eat vanilla pastries and pierre hermes macarons in the shadow of a church.

paris was light, music, romance; all delicacy and elegance, and so it was a little jarring to have justin suddenly call me to say: 'dude, paris is fucking boring on a thursday. you better fucking come. tell your friend there's booze here of the drinkable variety and models of the fuckable variety.' and so we are on the next eurostar to brussels, and soon, in the backseat of justin's mini while he hits 180 on the road to his house in overijse. after a dinner of pizza and marlboro ice blast on the verandah against a chilly backdrop of trees and suburbs, the three of us retire to justin's room where i get stupidly drunk on premium vodka while my two friends tease me mercilessly and fool around on facebook. justin shoots my brown belt a disdainful glare, says, i hope your shoes are brown, and pushes me through a cloud of deodorant, hugo boss, yves saint laurent, armani etc etc whatever, justin says, listen, no one here can pronounce jian yang, your name is charles and it's your birthday. and before i know it we're at the club, pushing past entry to our table. justin, disgruntled: do i look like i've ever paid cover charge in my life? (it's a friday night, light a cigarette) i see the intense blue of his lighter turn white paper brown, turn tobacco to fumes. my sight swims, foundering across this ocean of strobe lights, drowning in gobletfuls of grey goose. a belgian angel flits over, asks for a light like five times. (roll that dice girl, what you gonna bet?) then we are on the podium. i see the curve of her jaw, wavy thighs, a dainty nose, straight straw-spun hair. i could devour this girl. she assaults me on the dance floor, then slips a slinky arm around me and whispers, i'm sorry, my ass has its own personality. justin and kenneth have begun dousing the club in moet, my jeans, the passport in my pocket, all drenched. my white shirt a champagne rag. i am possessed by my migraine, possessed by my energy. i bleed stress, bleed sweat, bleed out the cruelties of stark daylight. at some point we leave but not before we have jived/shuffled a thousand hours away.

by spain we have picked up karen, who finished her oxford finals to a fanfare of music, confetti, cacti, and her friends; next stop, seville. most of andalucia i passed by in a haze of heat (forty two degrees in cordoba) food (delicious) and religious buildings (churches, mosques, and churches in mosques) the theme for this leg of the journey is tapas, that wonderful spanish invention of micro-meal sized servings; a plate of chorizo, a dish of iberian ham, some patatas bravas, a bowl of gazpacho, saturating my palate with olive oil and the aftertaste of ripe cheeses. we squeeze ourselves into the corner of a bar, drinking sangria and absurdly good wine while watching funny looking dogs stalk past. my tolerance for religious buildings was at a low after the welter of churches rome offered, but cordoba's mezquita (a church, bathed in light, constructed inside a larger, shadowy mosque) and barcelona's sagrada familia (an insane building that, as claire pointed out, looked more like a pagan temple than a basilica; gaudi, the architect, took plaster casts from actual stillborn babies for one of the reliefs) could leave an impression on a sponge. but it was the bus ride from cordoba back to granada that i remember the most; a slow trek through winding paths, fields and fields of sunflowers, and finally those winking manmade lights coiling at the foot of the sierra nevada.

in istanbul our hostel overlooked the bosphorus, and when we walked out onto the roof terrace we could see clear across the river. this was a city that, by night, tingled with gumdrop lamplights, hung across a clothesline here, crowding a shop there, draped across rooftops and fading walls. a city that by night featured birds circling illuminated minarets, like crows hovering about a sorcerer's slender tower, its point piercing a dark and deep sky. amid shisha smoke we drank warm tart apple tea and sweet turkish beer and forgot all the meals we ever had before that lunch, that dinner, that dessert. here we are near the end, i thought, sucking from the water-pipe, staring at my friends. and in santorini our hostel overlooked heaven, and when we walked out of the door we were consumed by it. we felt land, a canvas for god; felt colour, cool and defined, i could hear the soft azures and taste the chalk whites; felt an indestructible breeze. and i wanted to save, for rewinding's sake, that first contact between toe and water, when i leapt into the infinite sapphire of the aegean sea. freeze that instant when the cold supercharged life into my veins. it was as if it were all too beautiful to have happened. after the sun set and darkness fell i forged out into the relentless winds and sent tendril after tendril of electric blue smoke careening up to the sparkling night sky. did i not say i would find the stars and the sea? find all the questions that have been waiting. where could i find myself, hide myself. in a roman ruin? on a parisian street, at a belgian club, a spanish bar? on turkish air, in grecian waters. run this all in reverse so that it makes sense again. my dear boy, this is what motion feels like. you think that's your body tearing itself apart, but all the pieces only truly disassemble if you fall behind. we are all going forward. none of us are going back.

"You sit there," she says, pointing to the far side of the low table. A monk in heat, a dog in a cassock. Her forearms glisten with sweat. She blows out the candle. We take solemn turns with the joint and say nothing. Our fingertips might brush. Hers contain an electric current. Bioborg. I make out her outline in the glow of the night city, even filtered through the paper. She doesn't actually touch me, and her demeanor warns me against touching her until she tells me to. The bright tip of the joint travels through the turfy air. Sometimes I am me, sometimes I am not quite. Pearls, moonstone, teeth enamel. A time/space irregularity explores my limbs. Onto the dark, I airbrush her breasts, her hair, her face. if I sneezed right now Godzilla would probably explode in my boxer shorts. "You smoke like this all the time?" Her words are twists in the smoke. "Ever since my twentieth birthday." A scroll, doll, droll troll, a bowing chrysanthemum in a vase. "So how old are you, roadie?" I even hear her lush hair hush. "Twenty-three. You?" Bitter snowflakes flurry. Lying is so easy. "I am one million today." One spanky whoop from Velvet and a grrrrrrrr from Daimon, and Velvet and I are laughing hard enough to fracture ribs, even though no sound comes out. Then I forget why I was laughing, and I sit up again. "Keep your hands on the table," she warns me severely, "I hate boys whose hands get everywhere." After a couple of attempts our mouths meet and we kiss for nine days and nine nights.

-- David Mitchell, number9dream


justin's birthday at a sentosa villa. i am not the keenest, i think, this library boy, who enfolds the dark of the cinema about him like a cloak; don't do so well at large parties, and would have preferred to stay sidelined, operating on wallflower vision. but while we have our bukit timah kids, justin is a beverly hills kid, and ambushes his guests at the front door with sprays from the super soakers he loaded up with vodka. some surprise then, just five minutes in, my shirt already a puddle of cloth on a side table, when i step outside and dj amy screams, i want you all to know! that jian yang! isn't wearing anything! under his jeans! two musclemen clamber out of the hot tub, alcohol-scented, hijack my limbs, and i am a human depth charge, rippling the pool. in these new environs i run into an old friend, joel; we relax in the warm water, chat, and have as many cigarettes as we can, trying to keep the cylindrical paper dry. scarlett, a petite vietnamese doll, her drenched summer dress clinging to her like a colourful candy wrapper, foil our attempts with giggly blasts from the vodka guns. the laughter and shrill screams thicken the island night. amy splashes frothy waves at me; scarlett takes a few shots from a bottle, and the lighter that justin gave me (inscribed: i heart poker) succumbs to the rampant moisture. 

now i am talking to a regular army sergeant; he sits next to me, in his drenched white briefs, bony and angular. his nasal voice washes lightly over my ear; i am staring, fixated, at the ink-blue spartan helm tattooed over his chest. about me in the pool the intoxicants have begun their work; everyone slides towards dissolution. joel embraces his small fiancee, hand on waist, lip to lip, drunken tongues twirling as i watch, faintly interested at this public tableau of intimacy, made blurry through the mist of smouldering tobacco. the water is murky, and brings a very slight coolant burn; justin later said that by the end of the night the poolwater was at least forty proof. sergeant leonidas snakes his arms around a half conscious scarlett and hectors her into drinking more, more with him. she protests, tries to get out of the pool, but he has her in an octopus grip. light refracts off the water's surface, illuminating a menagerie of stupefied faces. i climb out onto dry ground. in the toilet two freshfaced guys have found a nigerian passed out, sprawled in the bathtub; they hold his head under the showerhead, his addled arms waving about feebly. two people begin fucking in the changing room. i retire to the bedroom, collapse to the carpeted floor, halfnaked shivering in the airconditioning, in my vodka-soaked jeans, try and sleep. the tv screen above me broadcasts the election results as the votes are tallied; but i am distant, a vagrant traveller, made a stranger by this surreal night.