Trip to Wuhan, 2020

CREATIVE NONFICTION

by Charlotte San Juan

          The train to Wuhan is going to be five hours, and a man in another row is hunched over himself, replaying the same video on his phone: Circus music, laugh track, applause. Circus music, laugh track, applause. A saleswoman leads a food cart down the aisle, the cadence of her voice in Chinese echoing. The song of it all carries into the next train car and the next, footsteps like a mantra fading. And out the cool glass windowpane, she, the passenger, lets the blur of fields unfurl, with the ever-so-often blip of architecture. The ever-so-often fisherman. Stray dogs on a dirt path, gone. A goose tucked into itself on a boulder, gone. And finally some hills that breathe with bamboo, and more fields dotted by the architecture of brother hills. The man next to her sleeps on his own shoulder and becomes a boy in his dreams. Dark, obstinate brows clench his face and relax when she touches his cheek. She wants to lower his mask and press his plum lip with the tip of her thumb, as if to plant a new dream there.
         At the hotel in Wuhan, they are required to stand one meter apart, and she walks through the temperature scanner as if passing into another life. There are of course cameras and a grand chandelier that reminds her of a movie where a chandelier falls. Chandelier is a French word, no? She decides not to say this, she only grins under her mask and steps into an elevator trimmed with gold, where she wants to pin him to the mirror wall and kiss as they ascend, despite a stranger in the corner with pocketed hands. But she decides not to do this. In the room, she wants to say something like Finally, peace, but instead she touches a palm to the windowpane to feel that outside is still freezing. She jumps into the white bed-cloud facedown and screams into it something like Hallelujah! And thinks: My god, tomorrow he’ll fight. 
         He is pale with tiredness and hunger, but to make weight, he’ll run. The hotel gym is haunted at 9pm with only a plump straggler on the weight-set, hardly moving. They are apart from each other by one treadmill, and she is walking barefoot on it, watching a muted film on the small screen—a terrible film about untrusting Americans—meanwhile he is concealed in his hooded sweater, sprinting. She can see him breathing steadily, blank as snow. The boy is there, under the heavy frame of a man’s body, zipping across all the pavement of an old, wounded Paris, dashing beyond an infinite measure of suburbs, his heartbeat skipping out into the world.
         Tomorrow he will fight, and the adrenaline will redden him. He will taste his own blood, clash against other fighters in that makeshift arena, juxtaposed by pint-sized children who chase each other’s laughter, happy oxygen pluming in frigid air. Tomorrow she will run after him with water, pushing oranges into his mouth, shouting in English, staring down his competitors, cheeks spiked with fury. Hours there, cracking her knuckles, rolling her neck, pacing, shouting, muttering, staring, cheering, enveloping him at the end, tracing the cold, raised letters of his medallions, stashing them into his bag and leaving.
          They walk for a long time. Wuhan is conservative with her flowers; the roads are clean here, the taxis are different. When, at some point, did they see figure skaters? In her mind, there is an ice rink and again small children frolicking and falling down and getting up again, as they do. There is an echo of Chinese Christmas, and nobody wants to talk about the virus. Now they are perched at Starbucks and are two children again, their masks on their chins, eating pastries with their hands and looking out the window at the string lights, feeling far off. And then she thinks—a blip—about the Shanghai cat, sitting at the window waiting for them, as it grows darker. The cat will monitor the ginkgo tree which has shed its yellow and is dancing with quiet birds, and she will curl up into herself, on the edge of the bed, in the middle of a folded sweater perfumed by humans.