A Jump to Heaven’s Gate

“A Jump to Heaven’s Gate”

一

Taylor was born and raised in Grayson, Kentucky, a rural, scenic little town with a population of about 4,000.

He’d had a fairly typical small-town American life, was handsome, outgoing and popular and played wide receiver on the football team in high school. He’d dreamed of playing in the NFL, being a superstar athlete, marrying a supermodel, or marrying his namesake, Taylor Swift, Taylor & Taylor… Oh, he could see them, hand in hand, walking on a glistering beach, under a crimson sun, their names written in the sand… Taylor & Taylor…

He’d marry Taylor Swift, and he’d be making millions, playing in the NFL, breaking all of Jerry Rice’s receiving records. He’d be on TV commercials. He’d be somebody. Somebody GREAT. That was his dream…

But that dream didn’t pan out, and his varsity teams stumbled to losing records, didn’t even qualify for the playoffs, and he wasn’t recruited by any colleges, and his grades weren’t high enough to earn him any scholarships.

Aside from football, it was largely parties and girls that occupied his time in high school, not too much else. Books had never been a priority.

However, he had developed an interest in science, and became infatuated with the field of neuroscience, obsessed with the idea of him becoming a world-renown neuroscientist, having taken a shine to the topic after watching a few Sam Harris YouTube videos.

After enrolling at Eastern Kentucky University and failing to make the team as a walk-on, he completed his bachelor’s in pre-med (with a minor in frat parties, binge-drinking). Upon receiving his diploma, though, he again didn’t have the grades for a scholarship to med school and went further into debt as he struggled through a neuroscience PhD program at his alma mater and worked part-time stocking shelves at Walmart.

His drinking, which had been a weekend, party thing through high school and college, became an everyday thing for him. He’d begun drinking his coffee splashed with Jameson Irish whiskey, shotgunning 3 or 4 Busch beers with lunch, and pounding 6 or 7 shots of Jack Daniels or Old Crow or Jim Beam bourbon alongside dinner.

Despite his heavy alcohol intake, he was functional, never getting too buzzed where he couldn’t show up to school or work, get his tasks done, though the quality of his PhD research, papers was erratic, and he’d regularly be involved in shouting matches, sometimes shoving and in minor physical altercations with coworkers at Walmart, but nothing severe enough to warrant termination.

After eking out his thesis, completing his PhD, his dissertation, his defense, which he considered to be a work of unapparelled genius, an ingenious work severely misunderstood and maligned by his advisors, Taylor packed his belongings into garbage bags, crammed all his stuff into the trunk and backseat of his blue Ford Focus, and drove from Richmond to Louisville to seek work and fulfil his dream of being a famous academic or a wealthy researcher or highly regarded scientist at a multinational corporation. But, to his chagrin, he had trouble finding ANY work in academics or research. At all.

He lacked work experience in the neuroscience field, yet he had just graduated, and many employers wanted a candidate with prior work experience.

This infuriated him. How was he supposed to have 2 or 3 years of work experience when he’d spent the last few years completing his studies? It was indeed quite the conundrum…

The job search left him with a sour taste, and soon he’d developed a disdain for his country, America.

His whole life his parents, teachers, the TV told him of the virtues of a college education and that once he had a diploma in his hand, then he’d have a great job, a house, wife, kids, picket fence, et cetera.

And he’d done that.

Yet here he was, with a fucking PhD, and still no one was giving him an opportunity. No one was giving him shit, and door after door slammed in his face, application after application was rejected, and no one seemed to recognize the brilliance of the online research he’d done and published on his blog and spoken of on his YouTube channel, which had nearly THREE HUNDRED subscribers…

Further and further he sank into credit card debt, trying to simply pay his rent, car, buy food, and his debt compounded, started piling high as a Himalayan mountain- this on top of the six figure sum he already owed in student loans.

Shit…

It made him more and more bitter every day.

It wasn’t only the economics of America, it not being the meritocracy he thought. He also hated the atmosphere, the political correctness, the bickering, the Twitter battles, the liberals and conservatives whining at each other while people like him barely made end’s meat. It was gross. It was stupid. What had this great country become?

二

Fed up, Taylor began to look elsewhere, look eastward, far east, to China.

China was the next great superpower, he posited. It was inevitable, with its large population, 600 million strong middle class, its manufacturing base and high-tech society and bullet trains he’d seen on YouTube videos.

He marveled at China’s ever-expanding economy and ingenuity and admired how the government of China got things done. How the people there were so united, so together, had such purpose. China reminded him of America back in the 1950s, when the country really was great.

Taylor had read online of the abundance of work, business and financial opportunities in China and began to study Mandarin.

He started applying to jobs at companies and think tanks, thinking he’d be highly prized, considering his PhD, but all he could find was work teaching English, mostly at training centers and public schools, and many of those jobs consisted of singing songs, dancing and playing games with children, which wasn’t for him, someone of his abilities and education.

Initially he was disappointed, but his spirits lifted when he came across a job for a position at a university near Beijing.

The job was for a “university lecturer”, and while it consisted mostly of teaching conversational English classes, it did offer possibilities of “research” and grant money for projects. Taylor figured it could be a gateway to bigger and better things and sort of liked the idea of being a “college lecturer.” It sounded very distinguished. Surely, he’d be highly respected.

After a brief Skype interview, in which he was asked only a couple basic questions about himself, he was hired, sent a contract.

The work visa process for a “Z Visa” was a pain in the ass, cost him nearly $700 in assorted fees, but he thought of the old adage, “It takes money to make…” and he sucked it up, went further into debt, deeper down the hole after shelling out an additional $1000 for his plane ticket.

Finally, though, after 2 months, he had secured his visa and boarded a plane, for the first time ever, and sat squished into the middle seat, in coach, and flew from Louisville to Beijing, on four connecting flights, for a total of 6,853 miles and 28 hours, crossing clouds, mountains, oceans and timelines, on a preternatural journey to begin his new life…

三

Despite seeing videos, pictures online, Beijing was nothing like he could have imagined. It was colossal and awe-inspiring in a way that was almost like prestidigitation. He was overwhelmed, speechless as he groggily walked through and out of the sprawling, shiny new Beijing airport.

He then boarded a lemon-yellow cab, handed the cagey flattop driver a slip of paper with the school’s address and buckled up as they roared off into the brownish dusk, en route to his school.

Taylor whiplashed and shook with the vehicle as the driver tore through the city streets and highways like a bat out of hell. Panning his jetlagged gaze around in the backseat of the cab, he couldn’t believe how many people there were in Beijing, people in such massive clusters, swarming and teeming everywhere and anywhere, streets, roads, buses, buildings, everything peopled, jam-packed, huddled masses, bunched in, packed like sardines, fucking swimming, brimming, spilling oceans of humanity. There were probably more humans on one city block, bus or subway train than in the entirety of his hometown.

(These Chinese people must really be horny and fuck a lot, he pondered. How else could there be such masses of them…)

Beijing city went on for infinity and was eclectic, varying the spectrum from battered weather-worn gray blocks of Soviet style apartments that sat directly adjacent to ritzy high-rises, and towering glass office buildings, KFCs, shopping malls and supertall skyscrapers situated next to squarish traditional Chinese homes, Hutongs and pagodas and slanted roof Asian temples, the city a truly extensive mix, a striking contrast of old and new.

Taylor’s eyes lit up when he thought he spotted a UFO. But it was in fact a circular black drone that whirred by his taxi’s window and soared off and sliced into the gray haze of the chunky sky, and Taylor sat enthralled, his head cocked back, staring out at the cityscape full of flickering neon glows from endless rows of immense structures, the city’s dusky radiance like something from a sci-fi movie…

It was truly mesmerizing for him, a small-town kid, to arrive in such a dizzying, bustling metropolis… I mean, he’d been to New York City once, but this was another thing altogether, a place this alien, busy, populated and massive…

For the first time in his life, he felt like he was on the verge of greatness. For the first time, he felt like somebody, and he thought of his classmates from high school, still in his hometown, still at the same DQ. Those nobodies still not doing shit. If only they could see him now! He was in fucking CHINA!

四

His university was on the city’s satellite outskirts, Beijing’s never-ending, expansive edge. The campus in what used to be a farming community that was becoming urbanized, developed. Along the roads were tiny lots growing vegetables and ramshackle tin houses and restaurants, small groceries, street side vendors and boxy crumbling concrete buildings.

On nearly every street were newly built mobile phone stores, at least one or two phone stores per block.

Red banners and Chinese flags hung from nearly all buildings, and there were giant billboards featuring Chairman Xi smiling and PLA soldiers saluting at nearly every intersection.

The most prevalent thing, though, in the area had to be the construction. Construction on a scale Taylor couldn’t have exactly imagined.

There were half empty, half torn down, half constructed, newly constructed and about to be constructed structures situated on each street. There were newly built, mostly empty houses, office buildings, office parks, schools, stores, and some of the stores had fake “Starbucks” signs plastered on their fronts and mannequins standing inside the vacant buildings.

Constant cavalcades of mud-caked construction vehicles, semitrucks rumbled around every road, their tailpipes belching big black clouds of fumes that floated and dissolved upwards. The trucks drove furiously, honking their horns at one another, with purpose.

The trucks’ cargo rattled like storms and the trucks’ clangor bled into and mixed with the ubiquitous construction sites’ drilling, the clanking of heavy machinery, and the two harmonized, sounded a mechanical din.

The half torn up buildings and rubble all around first reminded Taylor of a tornado hit town, but the gray skies and ocher dust and local people in ratty clothes and facemasks sort of gave the place a Mad Max vibe…

五

The university was nice, though. Like a little oasis amid the bipolar fracas of construction and decay.

The campus was green, with many willow and poplar trees, lush foliage, violet and pink flowers dotted about its sprawling grounds.

The buildings appeared sleek and modern, Taylor thought, at first, while being given a tour of the campus by the middle-aged gruff admin lady who’d received him upon his arrival to campus, the lady’s lips not moving much as she spoke and her conservative, long gray pleated dress and her bowl-haircut, her bottle size eyeglasses reminding him of a Mormon, or a cult member…

Peering, looking closer into the buildings, though, as they walked briskly, Taylor discovered that many were empty or half-built inside… The school was only 10 years old and still developing, he figured, like the surrounding area, like anything, really; it was a work in progress…

At least his apartment, on the far edge of the campus, was, well, suitable. It was a basic but clean, spacious 2 bedroom on an upper floor of an 18 storey building.

But it had a few issues…

It as well looked a lot more posh on the outside than it was inside, its outside like a tall red-brick building, maybe a hotel or condo; but its inside had wires hanging from the ceilings in the hallways, and the hallways weren’t lit at night, one needed to use a flashlight to navigate the corridors, and the elevator kinda freaked him out because it still had peeling plastic wrappings on its inside walls and was plastered with ad stickers and graffiti scrawled about and phone numbers written randomly about the elevator car’s silver metal walls.

The elevator also had a persistent odor of secondhand smoke as security guards from the building, as well as Chinese university teachers, would smoke cigarettes in the elevators, and hallways, too. There were often cigarette butts strewn, stubbed out on the elevator floor.

(Fire hazards had always freaked him out, and the fire hoses in the hallways didn’t appear functional, and where a fire extinguisher was supposed to be encased, in a glass box, next to the elevators, there sat only a 1-liter plastic bottle filled with water… It unnerved Taylor, but the building was built of concrete and likely less flammable, or so he hoped…)

The building’s construction was sorta scary too. Although the apartment building was newly built, there were several cracks, fissures running up the walls in Taylor’s apartment, which he hoped were only superficial, those cracks.

The furniture, especially the bed, was hard and uncomfortable. Buying several additional pillows, cushions, and a bed mat, helped.

The road next to the apartment complex was a two lane highway, and it was a bit annoying, with semitrucks and construction vehicles barreling down it, at all hours, and the trucks would constantly pop jake brakes and blare, honk, and beep high decibel horns at one another and at every other vehicle nearby.

Earphones, earplugs, and a white noise app helped with the beeping from the trucks, but the sounds were so high-pitched, they could still be heard slightly…

What’s more, Taylor had several bouts of diarrhea upon moving to China, nearly once or twice a week, having loose sloppy shits or other stomach issues, and he quickly developed breathing problems, too, chronic coughs likely attributable to air pollution in the area, the air leaving layers of brownish dust that coated everything in his apartment, especially out on his balcony, the dust stubbornly present and persistent, no matter how much or how often he cleaned.

Still, despite the flaws, his life in China was an improvement, a big step up from Walmart and the shithole apartments he’d lived in, with their paper-thin walls and bowing ceilings that squeaked and squealed like a pig being slaughtered. Even the slight rattle and squeal of the honking trucks was better than hearing that neighbor lady’s baby’s shrieking and crying or the young couple who were always screaming and cursing at each other, and for sure better than hearing and smelling his last roommate’s farts.

And it was WAY better, too, than the double-wide he’d grown up in.

For the first time in his life he was able to live alone, with no family or roommates. He finally had a bathroom all to himself.

Best of all, the apartment, utilities were free, so he couldn’t complain, and he enjoyed that he was the only foreign teacher at his school, the attention it gave him, how tall it made him feel, and he loved his light, 10 hour per week schedule teaching classes of docile Chinese students, most of whom just slept or played on phones while he stood at his podium, reading from the class textbook or from a university provided PowerPoint.

Upon reaching China, Taylor was so elated, so high on the country, he barely drank, cutting back to a beer or two, maybe, at night, sometimes not drinking anything for the first time since high school. Of course, it did help, too, that the local beer tasted like piss and the national hard liquor, baijiu, tasted like foot fungus sieved through a stinky sock.

Taylor found himself enjoying his semi-sobriety, was sleeping far better at night and had gone down a couple pant sizes.

Life was good. He was in China! He was out in the world. He was a man of the world. An international traveler. A somebody. He was finally on his way to doing something, something great!

六

One of the best parts of his job was living on campus and not having to drive or own a car. Not needing a car was a blessing. He was saving tons of cash not having to pay for gas, insurance, maintenance, and all the other shit car owners get raped for, and he finally was earning enough money to pay off a portion of his student debt.

Thanks to his light teaching hours, he had enough time to study Mandarin, and was at it, diligently, swiftly becoming much more conversant, discovering he had a flair for the language, its syntax, characters and tones coming naturally to him. Perhaps he’d been Marco Polo in a previous life…

With his rapid rate of improvement, his linguistic skills were soon up to snuff, and he’d decided to venture out, see the local sights. But, after the lengthy trip via bullet train and several subway stops, Taylor’d been dismayed to discover that Sanlitun, and most of the expat bars, foreign restaurants in Beijing had either been shut down or had gone out of business.

“Where were all the expats, the parties?” he pondered. The few expats he did encounter on the streets looked paranoid, with eyes of shit, or they looked dead, more like zombies than humans, walking hollow with thousand-yard stares…

Beijing turned out to be far more boring as a city than he expected, no parties or much going on. There were police everywhere, many in riot gear, and he’d been stopped twice by the police, randomly at subway stations, to have his passport checked, questioned like a criminal on his comings and goings.

He left disappointed. He decided to stick more around his local area and be more adventurous, have a “real China” experience. Fuck those walking dead expats and fascist cops in Beijing. He’d learn more Chinese, anyway, talking to Chinese people.

Inspired after seeing a video on YouTube by a South African guy called Winston, who’d explored China via motorcycle, Taylor decided to do a bit of the same and bought a secondhand motorcycle from a Chinese coworker, a short guy with a weirdly sloped forehead, and Taylor excitedly strapped on a Nazi SS style helmet he’d gotten along with the bike and revved up the engine and set out to explore the local village near the school, riding off feeling like he was Indiana Jones.

七

To Taylor’s surprise, even in the village, there were security cameras everywhere, several, atop poles, on every block, cameras attached to buildings, cameras hanging from bridges. He wondered what could be happening here in the outskirts to warrant such surveillance…

Also, to his surprise, he discovered the local townspeople weren’t very welcoming of foreigners. Whereas his students or the city dwellers were either friendly, polite, or at worst apathetic, those in the village, stared and pointed at him like he was a zoo animal, and many gave him dirty looks, were passively aggressive, and one toothless old man in raggedy blue slacks and blazer spit at him, shook his fist and yelled something about “Panmunjom!”

After hearing the old man curse at him, and understanding a few things the locals had said about his personal appearance (him being fat, having a big nose) he started to regret learning Chinese…

He tried not to let it upset him, thinking it must be similar to America, how in hicktowns, parts of hillbilly Kentucky, people were ugly and racist but in big cities like Louisville, or metropolises like New York City, LA people were more educated and way cooler, generally. It’s probably like that anywhere, China included, he thought.

And he wouldn’t let it faze him anymore, dammit!

Dammit, he was going to make this work, score a high-paying job in Shanghai or Beijing, and he became even more determined to study Chinese, and his learning only accelerated, being immersed in it like he was, and shortly he knew enough characters to partially read newspaper articles, and he began reading news sites on the Chinese internet.

What he saw, though, online, on the Chinese internet, shocked him. Nearly every other national news article was about America or Japan. About how those countries were conspiring to fuck over China somehow, preparing for war, or attempting to steal an island or other territory, not just Taiwan, which Mainland Chinese had long thought belonged to them and demanded to have returned from America, but the Mainland Chinese also claimed several tiny islands belonging to other countries, as well as a huge chunk of international seas.

He’d noticed the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua (which translated almost to “Newspeak”) paid special attention to America’s failings, especially mass shootings, religiously reporting any shooting in America, which might have been the reason why so many of his students asked him if in America “everyone has a gun.”

As a person who’d become disillusioned and bitter with America, he didn’t mind shitting on it, himself, but to be off in a faraway land, and to discover how openly hostile the Chinese State media was towards his country of origin, really gave him a sick feeling.

Having researched China’s economy, he’d seen how America and Japan were China’s largest trading partners and how much foreign investment in China had lifted so many out of poverty. It boggled his mind that a country so dependent and such a beneficiary of global trade would have such antipathy for the nations it conducted trillions of dollars of trade with…

But his mind was really thrown for a loop when he read the online comments that followed the articles.

Open hatred, venom towards America and open calls from Chinese netizens for America to be attacked, for war, for American cities to be nuked.

Outright racist language against foreigners, especially blacks, which was befuddling considering how much the Chinese were into the NBA. And it wasn’t only a few nutjobs spewing such bigotry, it was thousands upon thousands of comments, endless streams of racist posts, none of which were censored or deleted, the whole thing making even a guy from Kentucky cringe.

Again, Taylor thought that maybe this was just trolls or idiots like on YouTube videos’ comments or freakish right-wing extremists like Breitbart. He again figured he wouldn’t find a lot of those people in a big city like Beijing or Shanghai, and that’s where he’d go anyway and where he’d do amazing things after he’d learned enough Chinese.

He was going to land a job at a big Chinese company, make fistfuls of cash, live the “Chinese Dream.” Nothing would stop him.

Every morning, he’d eat breakfast listening to Chinese language learning videos; afternoons were spent upping his calligraphy skills, sitting perched over his desk, with his pen to paper, copying Chinese characters, attuned to their radicals and strokes. And every evening, he’d spend hours reading Chinese children’s books, reading the pinyin, perfecting and practicing his tones, and then afterwards he’d have conversations with himself in the mirror, saying what he knew or learned that day or reading his learning exercises, dialogues aloud.

And his life got even better when he met a girl, one of his students, called “Apple”, a petite, dark-skinned Han Chinese lovely from Gansu province. The raven-haired beauty with a slender body, moon face, crooked smile and sexy librarian glasses. Apple spoke excellent English, which helped their courtship bloom, and she soon enough became Taylor’s first serious girlfriend.

He’d been having her over to his apartment, and, after only a couple weeks, she was living with him there…

Taylor imagined marrying her, taking her to Beijing. Them in a ritzy high-rise. Them with kids. Him making fistfuls of cash, speaking perfect Mandarin and working his way up to being a high ranking executive at a company that bought other companies and shit like that. Him on a private jet… Him featured on Chinese TV… Him living his Chinese Dream…

But that whole narrative took a different turn.

When a virus appeared in Wuhan…

八

It started off as an obscure story he saw posted in a China expat group online.

A mysterious pneumonia that’d broken out in Wuhan, near a “wet” market, a market selling live animals for slaughter.

He’d written it off, initially, thinking it was no big deal. There often were small-scale viral breakouts in China, especially related to food, food poisoning. But then, this one, of course, turned out differently, and it snowballed, became an epidemic, and nearly the whole of China, including his area of Beijing, was swiftly locked down; the country transformed into a 1-billion-person prison.

Forced to stay in his apartment, 23 and a half hours per day (allowed out only for a necessary trip to the campus grocery store or for takeout from the cafeteria), and on some days not allowed out at all, made to stay inside for 24 hours a day, his apartment started to seem smaller and smaller, the walls closing in on him.

His girlfriend was forced to leave sooner than anticipated and was removed, in tears, by campus police because she wasn’t registered to live in the domicile.

After she returned home, she came clean to her parents about her relationship with Taylor, and her father mercilessly beat and slapped her, bloodying her nose and threatening to kill her if she made him lose any more face and commanding her to never see that “white trash” again…

Losing his girlfriend was a true punch in the dick, and Taylor plunged hard into despair. He missed her deeply, his Apple, her soft touch, her smell, the egg-fried rice she’d cooked him, and how she’d warmed his bed at night, the way her little feet tickled at his legs underneath the sheets…

Losing his Apple, along with the malaise of being locked down pretty much 24/7, led Taylor back to the bottle, in a severe way, after Taylor discovered that although it tasted like wet shit, baijiu was super high in alcohol content and got him sloppy ass drunk.

Not only was his personal life fucked, but things across China deteriorated diplomatically when a theory was put forth, espoused not just by a freak on the internet, but by foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, that the virus was brought to China, purposely, to destroy China, by the US military, and all over China, foreigners were targeted, fired from jobs, evicted from apartments (videos emerged of Africans in Guangzhou forcibly removed from their homes, turned homeless, made to sleep rough), and foreigners were stigmatized, refused entry into grocery stores, and there were scattered reports of violent attacks against foreigners in China.

The hatred, incitement towards foreigners in China that was typically only online, priorly, was now spilling into the public space.

So Taylor, sipping on baijiu, decided it was time to bounce, at least for the time being, and put his China Dream on hold.

Several neighboring Asian countries had already closed their borders to foreigners, and flights back to America were few and far between or outrageously pricey, but Taylor did see that Thailand was still open. Plenty of flights going there, even as China had been locked down.

Taylor booked a ticket and boarded a half-full plane to Bangkok, feeling like an escaped convict as he passed through the airport full of police in facemasks and medical personnel in spacesuits.

九

When Taylor arrived in Bangkok, he wondered why he hadn’t been there the whole time.

There was sun, palm trees, and smoking hot babes everywhere, with bigger tits and asses, and the place was sunny, relaxed, and unlike most of the Chinese, who only talked with their faces, the Thais smiled and were friendly, genuinely so, without being simpering, and even people working at 7-Eleven spoke English fluently or knew enough English to get by.

There were foreigners, bars, parties everywhere, and the foreigners there weren’t zombies like in Beijing. They were fucking chill and there to have fun, and on his first night he’d hooked up with a Heidi-looking German backpacker girl he met at the airport and they had a wild and kinky fuck, a perfect rebound fuck… The Euro-chick letting him do things no other girl would…

Seriously, why hadn’t he been here all along? he wondered over a breakfast slice of pizza from 7-Eleven.

But then he started looking around at teaching jobs in Thailand, disappointingly discovering that the overabundance of existing foreigners, the sagging Thai economy and hordes of cheaper Filipino teachers had resulted in pittance wages, many teaching jobs in Thailand offering only around $700 to $1000 per month and requiring far longer hours than he’d been working.

Looking at the job ads online sent him into a rage. Like, $1000 a month? For someone as smart as him? $1000 a month? For a doctor of neuroscience? For a PhD? Fuck that! That wasn’t him. He’d wait out the situation in China. He could still go to Shanghai, make tons of money. This pandemic will pass. Someone would find a cure. Things would simmer down…

But he found there would be no fast fix, and that the situation in China for foreigners just got worse and worse, with more reports of violence and discrimination and soon enough, foreigners were banned from entering China, indefinitely, even those with residence permits and work permits.

Then the coronavirus spread to Thailand, not as severely as other nations, though still enough to close most non-essential businesses.

With nowhere to go, nothing to do, not able to afford a flight back to America, Taylor began to sink deeper into desolation.

Confined to his $7 per night, windowless room in a rundown guesthouse near Khao San Road, he was drinking more than ever.

He’d become afraid of sleep, afraid of the recent nightmare cycle that’d plagued him, the nightmares of naked women in surgical masks brandishing kitchen knives, the naked women chasing him through Jewish graveyards, the graveyards with mutilated tiger carcasses hanging by nooses from fir trees…

To avoid the strong arms of sleep he’d take Yaba pills and spend much of his time at night alone up on the silvered roof of his guesthouse, his limbs feeling heavy, and there he’d smoke cigarettes, and gulp red bull mixed with rum, and he’d sit slouched on a plastic stool, watching cockroaches, lizards, rats in the alley below, how they scurried up and down the pastel ledges and angles and crevices of the neighboring buildings, the dilapidated buildings.

The buildings that were nothing but stacks of boxes and levels and open doors and windowsills. And he’d stare out at the flapping clothes hanging humid, hanging over the iron bars, cages over the windows.

And he’d sniff at the mélange of Bangkok’s scents, the fried noodles, the acrid diesel exhaust, and there, on that roof, he’d listen to his ghosts and to the screaming motorbikes passing the void…

十

The four walls of his tiny guesthouse room started to close in on him like his apartment had before.

The white of the paint was all he could see.

Though he wasn’t sure he’d ever return to China, he kept up his Chinese studies, if nothing else out of obstinance and spite, and he would try to have conversations again with the mirror. But it was useless. Staring at his reflection, his face was either distorted or stiff as a mask, and its lines, especially those on his forehead, told of age.

To study Chinese, he’d mostly been reading Chinese news, avoiding the politically charged stuff, virus stuff and comment sections and had looked into more local news articles and had been developing a fixation with traffic accidents, of which there were a daily deluge, a consistent supply…

Car accidents. Bus accidents. Buses plunging into rivers. Cars hitting pedestrians. Trucks sideswiping motorcyclists. The accidents involving motorcyclists were the most spectacular, the combination of high speeds and velocity, the motorcycle riders being propelled, flying acrobatically, high into the air, crashing into somersaults on the pavement, their forms ending contorted and crushed and twisted like blood and bone pretzels.

There were thousands of such videos on the Chinese internet, many featuring musical accompaniment, usually racy classical music, and Taylor would spend his hours watching them on endless loops.

Drinking about a 70 cl bottle of Thai whiskey or rum per day, for the first time, Taylor thought of killing himself. Ending it all. And once he thought of suicide, he stopped fearing sleep, and he found he’d been enjoying his slumber, having pleasant dreams, again in the graveyards, but these dreams were of sunny days in graveyards, of himself naked, himself walking leisurely by deer that were eating, gnawing on the green grass matting the soil around the gravestones, the happy animals smiling up at him, while chewing on the hair of the dead.

Taylor loved the carefree state sleep brought him, and he’d considered how pleasing death, the “big sleep” would be. Never having to worry about anything again. And he wondered what would happen after he died, if there was something better than this.

He’d never been suicidal before. But now it was all he could think of. He thought of ways to kill himself, and jumping was the first that came to mind. Jumping. Jumping from a building, a tall building, thinking the harder he plunged, smacked and clapped to the concrete, the more powerful it’d push his soul and could launch him into whatever dimension awaited him next.

Daily visions of jumping entered his drunken thoughts, his drunken daydreams. And instead of car crash videos, he became fixated on jumpers, videos of jumpers, 9/11 videos, Faces of Death videos, and he wondered where the jumpers had ended up, which dimension.

The classic Van Halen song Jump showed up on his YouTube playlist, and he’d listen to it, over and over…

Might as well… Might as well…

十一

Watching the Van Halen Jump video, he believed there were secret messages in the video, a message, a code, a cipher, something in Eddie Van Halen’s wry smile or David Lee Roth’s dancing and Roth’s acrobatic dropkicks, Roth’s mouthing of “Jump” at the video’s end, and Taylor believed that the song was leading him to another place, another world, that Bangkok was a portal to something else, a higher plane, and if he jumped, fell hard enough to the pavement, he really could force his soul to exit his body and nudge it to the next realm.

And he pondered the next realm, slamming spicy shot after shot of Thai whiskey, thinking of the gate, the beautiful gate, leading to the Candyland, the Willy Wonka paradise that must await him behind the gate…

On YouTube he searched for gates, hoping to unlock the code, and he found a video from the group Heaven’s Gate, its leader Do, and, enraptured, Taylor heeded the message.

He realized it was a sign, an omen and invitation. Do had contacted him, through time and space and was attempting to wave Taylor to the realm, that Taylor jumping would lead him to the comet Hale-Bopp, the comet Do and his flock had boarded to escape Earth and Earth’s crises. Taylor realized that the coronavirus was a catalyst, an invitation, a prodding, a sign to escape and let the Earth wash the species.

Once Taylor sucked dry the whiskey bottle, it all made sense. He knew it was time. And he strapped on his Nikes and stumbled up to the guesthouse’s roof.

十二

Up on the roof, standing near the ledge, Taylor saw out through the swampy heat of the Bangkok night, swung his head, slowly, from side to side and gazed out at the neon lit skyscrapers, the buildings’ lantern eyes, thinking how one or two of the buildings were in on it, how one or two of those metal spirals of lights were likely rockets ready to blast off and glide into the galaxy, cross the gate…

One or two of the buildings probably had jumpers like him, ready to, or having already jumped and joined Heaven’s Gate. Graduated to the next realm. Taylor could see the jumpers smiling and waving at him before jumping, diving gloriously, flying like swans…

Taylor understood. He knew he wouldn’t be a football star. He wouldn’t be a famous neuroscientist. He wouldn’t be a rich businessman in Shanghai. And it was for the better. Humans. The Earth. It was all fucked. Whether by disease, war, a supervolcano, an asteroid or the sun burning out, humans were fucked. The planet would die. Everyone on Earth would die.

But not him. He would escape. This was it, his passage, his route, his tunnel through the galaxy. He’d go. This was it. This was the great thing he was destined to do. He would escape. He would no longer suffer humanity.

He would no longer be a human or a prisoner of Planet Earth. He’d be on a new planet. He’d have a new body. Knowing this, knowing his destiny, knowing the TRUTH, saw him in the most euphoric state he’d ever been…

Taylor, his legs turning into snakes, cranked up Jump in his earbuds, and he sparked up a menthol cigarette, sucked in the minty cool smoke, let the icy smoke fill his lungs up like balloons, rounded his lips and exhaled deeply, shooting a funnel cloud of smoke that morphed into a misty form, a form of an eyeless, gaunt face that hovered in front of him and shrieked: “I will show you sleep in a handful,” and then dissolved into sparkly red dust.

Taylor peered below, where the red dust had fallen, and saw a large crowd of foreigners, all with their arms raised or outstretched, some in Jesus poses, some with arms swaying above their heads, some motioning at Taylor to come forward, and the opening keyboard riff of Jump looped and played over and over, and Taylor noticed Do down there with the foreigners, Do in long black robes, beaming with his big hazel eyes, smiling so happily, and he was also motioning Taylor forth, and everyone down there looked so peaceful, so post-human…

Stepping closer to the ledge, Taylor hummed “might as well…” and was about to… When he stopped in his tracks at the voice calling to him from behind.

It was a female voice. The voice of an angel. A sexy southern belle, a Scarlett O’Hara type accent, a drawl that was sweeter than sugar, a voice more beautiful than any sound he’d ever heard before.

Taylor walked backwards a few steps, pulled his phone from his jean pocket, clicked pause on the VH.

Then he craned his neck around and saw a stunningly gorgeous girl, a ravishing 6’5 Nordic goddess, a taller, identical twin of a young, 2010 Taylor Swift, the leggy blond beauty in coal-black short shorts and matching black titty-tight Van Halen red/yellow logo T-shirt, and she was wearing fiery red flip flops and several multi-colored thread bracelets and anklets, and her long curly golden hair was like a halo, her immaculate hair flowing teasingly in the touch of the humid night’s breezes…

“Do you have a light?” the beauty asked loudly but patiently, a radiant smile twisting across her thin red lips, her smile so divine it restored a feeling deep inside his battered soul, a feeling he thought he’d lost inside himself…

He turned his head for a second, looked down again at the alley below. The crowd of foreigners had vanished, save for one tall lanky chap, a young buck with a shock of bushy black hair, the lanky chap in Burmese dress, a longyi, the fellow standing and clapping and hooting and hollering up at Taylor.

Taylor spun back around. Fixed his gaze back to the sizzling hot southern belle.

“A light? Do you have one?” the beauty asked again, her crystal blue eyes open wide, big as saucers as she was making a lighter flicking gesture with her right hand, touching it at the long thin cigarette dangling from her left hand.

“Yes. Yes, I do…” said Taylor, ebulliently, stepping away from the ledge.