The Great White Menace
July 14, 2010
This didn’t really happen. Or at least I’d rather believe that it did not.
In fact, to this day, I am not altogether certain whether the events in my mind actually took place because I’ve deliberately distorted my memories, reshaping them into friendlier feelings whenever they surface during the waking moments of my dreams.
The year was 2006 and Beijing was being consumed by the scorching summer sun. I was with my “peng you” who spoke nothing but Chinese, and I, nothing but English. I had hired her to show me around the city, but there was absolutely nothing to see. A sandstorm had hit the city and decided it wanted to hang out a bit. Everywhere we went, grits of sand swirled around in the thick air, making it difficult to breathe and bringing down the visibility to a mere 10 feet. My “friend” wore a silk stocking around her face which made her look like a silly bank robber but one that was breathing comfortably. I had no such fabric to protect my eyes nor aid my breathing but that was the least of my worries.
I am claustrophobic. The last time I had a massive attack was when we went spelunking in New Zealand. I thought I was afraid only of small spaces, but in fact what I was afraid of was the inability to see space. As we went deeper into the cave and the darkness grew, I felt the walls close in around me even though the sound of the rushing water and the cold breeze passing my body told me we were entering a cavernous area. Mind winning over matter, I scrambled out, forcing one of my friends to end her journey before it had even begun.
And now here I was on yet another journey that I wanted to end swiftly. Worse, I was bereft of good companionship to both endure its beginning and celebrate its end. As the panic in my belly rose to my throat, I used every ounce of strength to suppress the surfacing scream. Decades of societal politeness bullied into me proved stronger than my irrational instincts. So the only sounds that came out were, “can we please go back to the jiu dian.” Apparently, in my paradoxical mind, to end my miserable fear of small spaces required getting inside a small room so that I could see and touch and make sense of the world again.
“Hao, Hao, wo gen ni qi jiu dian,” my friend intoned in congenial agreement. The words that I understood, “hao, good, and jiu dian, hotel,” were all I needed to hear to know we were on our way. After about an hour of walking briskly in what felt like a garden maze of circles, I knew we were hopelessly lost in the ancient Mongolian alleyways called the hutongs. I couldn’t blame my companion for not knowing her way around. The white shroud all around us made it nigh impossible to figure out where we were.
Desperate, I started saying “coffee” over and over again to get her to bring me to a restaurant, a cafe, anything but outside bathing in the blinding white clouds of dust. She averred in successive nods, “jiu dian you coffee.” It sounded, right. She said two things I wanted, hotel and coffee. But frankly I had stopped trusting her already. I stopped trusting her when the blister on my pinky toe had reached its bubble threshold with all the walking we had done. My only consolation was that the pain was something familiar in this strange land. Further concentrating on cradling my little bubble with every step, the distraction was enough to dissipate some of my senseless fear. So we kept walking.
This is usually the point where my dream starts to go into repeat mode. We will walk, I’ll look at my foot, we’ll have the same stunted conversation, and we never find the hotel which is probably why I keep having the same dream now and again. Strangely, my blister also never bursts although I’ve tried to pierce it in my dream, just to change the story. I’ve also tried to make us actually find the hotel during the in between states of wakefulness and sleep, but I am never successful. I can’t quite figure out why since we did eventually find the hotel in real life. It seems that fearsome event has been thrust so deep down into my subconscious that I still travel into that great white menace whenever something current is making me feel out of control again.
Maybe writing this story has finally put an end to it. Or maybe my feet just need to keep on walking.
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