In our final year of college, a friend once showed me the Schedule of his Life, sketching its foundations on the back of an envelope during a party at my flat. Watching him work, I was impressed by the precision with which he sketched out the skeleton of his future's structure (marking the beginning and end of the entire list first, then anchoring down the years, then filling in the contents). When he was done it looked like this:

+ NOW : Graduate
+ 1 YEAR : Start work
+ 3 YEARS : Buy house
+ 5 YEARS : Get married
+ 7 YEARS : Have first child
+ 11 YEARS : Have second child
+
+
+
+
+
+ 37 YEARS : Retire

"Does she know about this?" I asked him.

"It's just a plan," he said.

"What's the space between second child and retirement for?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know why you put it there?" (This was unfathomable; an engineer creating a feature that he could not justify.)

"I mean, it's for things that I don't know will happen," my friend said. He was an inhumanly intelligent but kind person, and often spoke kindly and slowly to me when I could not follow the lightspeeds of his reasoning.

"You mean, if you have a third kid?"

"No," he said. "We will only have two children. I mean, things like offers of better employment, or getting posted to a different country, or if she gets posted to a different country."

I did not say anything -- at this time in our lives it was hard to say death, divorce, disease, or other words starting with D, unless they ended in RASS, or OT. (Later I realized that dreams also start with D, and perhaps he was leaving space for those.) I wanted to ask him instead how he had derived the content and order of his schedule -- house after work, marriage after house, children after marriage -- but as he gestured, moving his hands about, he knocked a glass of wine off the table. He made an effort to catch it on its way down and when we looked over the edge of the table I felt rather sorry for him; it had been a heroic effort. The glass was unbroken, but the wine had been red and the carpet was the colour of cream (now, not entirely).

"Sorry," my friend said. "Didn't expect that."

 

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Unlike my friend, I had another year to graduate, and I had no steady girlfriend whom I had been dating for five years and was expected to propose to, thus escaping the expectations and wrath of:

a) all immediate and some extended members of both families,
b) old high school friends,
c) current college friends, and
d) the Postal Services and International Telephone Card companies of two different countries, who had been ferrying letters and magnetically reproduced sounds across half the world for almost four years now, sowing the seeds of love and commitment and an incumbent, inescapable future.

Instead, I had China.

 

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Each faculty of the university we were in had its own academic watering hole where assorted student fauna flocked to eat, drink, and prey upon other species. The quality of game varied from faculty to faculty; judging from the number of tables filled, Medicine either had the best food, or the prettiest girls, or a lethal combination of both. The honorable pursuit of the medical profession was now something of a code-word between the lowlier life-forms who prowled the Medical building at lunch time, us unshaven engineers and biologists and mathematicians and physicists; very often a friend would see me studying or lounging around in the company of China, and after exchanging greetings, would lean closer and ask, furtively, "Is she a medic?"

I have since realized that China, like the country, looks entirely different to different people; there is no objective answer to the question of 'is she beautiful?' or aggregate rating on the score of 'how beautiful is she?' Somewhere in this universe, there must exist an absolute scale of human beauty, just as the Ampere exists to measure units of electricity...

Without such an impartial scale, it would be such a mystery why different people continue to react to electricity in different ways. Some electrocutions kill people on the spot; others allow their victims to survive with massive burns, or an acute ringing in the left ear for the rest of their lives, or just a slight headache that is gone by the next day. It is really just your luck what amount of electricity you happen to be exposed to. The only thing we can agree upon is that, past a certain voltage, the experience is utterly unforgettable. And perhaps, having been struck by lightning, we are more sensitive to changes in the weather from then on.

But lightning does not know or care what it strikes; it is only looking for a way down, back to the drowsy and gentle earth, as if everything must really tend slowly downward. At least, from the electrocuted person's point of view, that's how it is, and I'm certain that she doesn't love me.

 

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Say -- After forcing you to wade through so much text, building up so much hype, talking about the great, terrifying, beautiful rifts in reality she creates as she passes through my life -- after making you sit through all that, I don't think I can go through with this after all. I can't bring myself to describe her. I'm afraid that if I show her to you, you'll fall in love with her, too. And it's not just that I don't want you to take her away from me. You look like a decent person. Maybe it's enough for only one of us to be in this position. You understand, don't you? Here, let me tell you this instead:

 

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One morning I got up really early and had nothing to do. It was a holiday; I decided I would spend it walking around the new shopping mall that had opened, several streets away. I walked out of the empty hotel lobby and into an empty street where everything had been rainwashed to the most delicate shades of black and grey and green. Two blocks away, I knew I had left my mobile phone on the table beside my bed, and I also knew that my mother would be trying to call me. I almost turned around to go back and take it; then, as I was considering the idea, I looked up and realized I had reached the mall. On the pavement, outside the mall, surrounded by grey buildings and wet concrete and drooping, dripping trees, I looked up at the struts and spars and glass structures that formed the outer shell of the new mall, and admired its beauty. But the sound of my shoes on the pavement echoed against the walls, and my hands were cold and empty even after I had put them into my pockets. Of course, it was so early, there would be practically no one here. And of course, China was not with me, and I was alone.

I picked up a pamphlet from a stand as I passed it, and looked into the window of the shop it belonged to; the glass display was lined with boxes, photographs of houses labeled with numbers of rooms and street addresses and prices. It seemed to me that the mall was asking me to think about buying a house, and getting married, and having two children. It's not that I don't want these things, I said to the mall. But if I choose to have these things, then I will not have China. And if I have China, then I will not have these things. And even if having China means having a wall between these things and myself for the rest of my life, and even if it means having a wall between her and myself for the rest of my life, I think I will still want to have China, always.

As I came to this conclusion my heart was seized with a terrible sadness, as if, having realized this, I would certainly never see her again.

I turned around and walked out of the mall. I wondered where exactly I had left my mobile phone, and if she would be awake to pick up my call. Outside the mall there were police cars, and an officer with a megaphone; suddenly, everyone who lived in the surrounding neighborhood was awake, crowding the pavement, pointing into the sky, staring upward with wide eyes and gaping mouths. I looked up, since it seemed urgent. In the distance, against a skyline of townhouse roofs and low-rise flats, a dark cloud hung across the sky, like a mountain slowly rising across the city. No one spoke, not even the officer with the megaphone. Even the pigeons perched on the street-lamps and windowsills were silent and still.

Of all the things I felt, the most acute were the lightness of my pockets because I had not brought my phone; a hollowness of heart, seeing that dark cloud moving slowly closer and closer; and a sudden irresistible surge as of torrents in spring, the way I used to feel when I was watching the track team running from the bleachers. The feeling of something moving so lethally fast you cannot hope to keep up with it, let alone win, but as you sit there watching your own body curses you for not even trying.

Someone touched my arm; I turned around and saw my friend from college, who had shared with me the Schedule of his Life.

"Come on," he said.

"Where are you going?"

"Away from that thing."

"It's going to be here faster than we can run away from it."

"We can drive," he said.

"You don't have a car."

"The number 49 stops just down the road in two minutes."

"Do you really think the bus service is still running in a state of emergency?"

"I have great faith in this city's public transportation system," he said. "Anyway, you know how to drive a bus, don't you? It's about the same as driving a car. I'll help you. Let's go!"

"It's going to get the whole city," I said.

"I bet it won't reach Bayswater."

"It looks kind of big."

"For a person who forgot to bring his mobile phone, you sure are critical," he said. "Let's start running."

We turned away from the silent crowd gathering on the pavement and that dark cloud spreading over our world. At the back of my head I was counting down the minutes to when it would reach us, and we would not be able to outrun it.

"Is this because you have a schedule to keep?" I asked him.

"What schedule? Oh, that. Well, sort of."

"I thought it had lots of spaces for things you didn't know would happen."

"Not when they get in the way of things I want to happen," he said. "I mean, I didn't write down those things because they are expected of me. I really, really, really want to get married, buy a house, have two children, and eventually retire. I'm not a tortured artist like you, striving to enrich the world with revelations of beauty. Little things are enough for me.

"Still, just because they're simple, in a time of crisis, it doesn't mean that such mundane things aren't worth fighting for. If something comes between me and these things even as I'm walking closer to them, I'll do everything I can to climb over it, and continue walking."

"That's a fatally simplistic way of thinking about it," I said.

"But that's what you're already doing," he said. "You don't have a schedule, and I don't think we have the time to stop by your studio and pack up all your paintings. Why are you coming with me? Why don't you stay crouched down on the pavement with everyone else?"

"Because you asked me to!"

"You could have turned me down. We aren't that close as friends, you know. I wouldn't be offended. Wow, that cloud sure is moving fast! Better step up your pace a bit."

"I want to call her," I said. "And I didn't bring -- Hey, how did you know I didn't bring my mobile phone?"

 

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She was sleeping beside me when I woke up. When I held her hand and looked at her face, the pace of my heart slowed down, and reduced to a steady, calm beat. The room was a dim sepia half-light as if we were actors in a Wong Kar-Wai film where everyone had set the lights and cameras but then left the set, and we had fallen asleep and no one had come to wake us. Distantly, I could hear and sense people laughing and talking and eating, but they were far away, they might as well not be in the same world as us at all. On the balcony a wind chime sounded three times. Over the foot of the bed the curtains were burning a fluttering white rectangle into the wall.

That's it, what I wanted to tell you; what she feels like, to me.

 

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The Berlin Wall has been torn down. There is no longer any need for it, and if you ask the people on either side of it, they might tell you that there was no need for it in the first place. But far away, in a hot and yellow land of dry grass and ghost winds, the Great Wall still stands. During its construction, or perhaps even before the first stones were laid, the Emperor must have known that in a hundred years' time -- perhaps fifty years' time -- perhaps ten years' time -- his enemies would have changed sides or strategies, and the wall would no longer suffice. Still, he built it. Now he is dead and the Wall is battered and broken, but it still stands. And for what? Tourists throng its stairs; students party drunkenly upon its battlements; filmmakers and historians make pilgrimages across its sagging back, but what they wish to document is no longer there, has been buried and fossilized and worm-eaten away together with the workers who built it, the Mongols who were thwarted by it, the empire that commanded its construction. Everything, eventually, passes out of the era in which it was constructed. People grow up, and leave behind them the things that hurt them in their childhood. But sometimes it seems that walls endure for so long.

(Will you ever love me?)

There is a photograph of a piece of graffiti on the Berlin Wall I remember seeing, when I was old enough to use a computer and egoistic enough to Google my own name. The words are, "Irgendwann fällt jede Mauer". Sometimes, when I cannot sleep at night, I put my hand on her shoulder, trace the form of those letters on her skin. Irgendwann fällt jede Mauer. Every wall eventually falls.

 

FIN