I couldn't see anything. I thought that I may have gone blind. On top of that I couldn't move. And on top of that I had a horrible headache, a headache like I'd never had before, my brain throbbing like a fucking heart. Then I heard a noise. Someone had opened the door, and I could hear him shuffling in. I could hear him breathing, a groaning kind of breath, and a cough. Then, all at once, the lights came on, dirty fluorescent blinding light and I could see a silhouette bending over me.
The silhouette coughed, then said, "You in my apama, missa! You go! You go out!"
I said, "My head hurts."
He repeated: "You go out! You go!"
"I can't move," I said.
He coughed, then shuffled off and shuffled back, holding a knife. I thought he planned to stab me. I squirmed. I shouted. He cut the straps that bound me to the couch, leather straps. Then he said, "You go! You go out!"
I said, "My head is--bursting. Can you help me?"
"You go!" he said.
I said, "My head hurts."
He said, "I make you tea! Afta tea you go!"
I said, "Don't you have an aspirin?"
He coughed, then said, "I make you tea! Specia tea betta aspira!" He shuffled off, coughing, and I heard him rattle some china, pouring liquid, shuffling back. He reappeared, holding a rattling teapot and cup. He placed both on the table. He had a pretty bad tremor, and I expected the tea to spill all over the place, but then, as he poured it into the cup, his hand became perfectly firm. He shoved it in my face and said, "You drink tea! Make you betta!"
I sat up and took the cup. The tea stank like nothing I had ever smelled. I said, "This is--tea?"
He said, "You drink! Make you betta!"
"It stinks," I said.
"Medici tea!" he said. "Ginga and dong quai! Make you betta!"
I drank the fucking thing. Strangely enough, it didn't taste that bad. It tasted a little bit like chicken soup, insipid chicken soup, but nothing like the nauseating stench of it.
Almost immediately, my headache became bearable. It didn't disappear, but my brain stopped knocking at my skull. I stood up. I thought I might be ready to leave. I said, "This is good stuff," but as I said "stuff," I felt suddenly feeble. My knees buckled. I fell back on the couch and could not get up, and again I couldn't see anything, and I could hear the old Chinaman laughing through his cough. I mumbled, "You--poisoned--me." He continued to laugh. Then I passed out, and minutes or hours later, maybe days, I have no idea, I came to, and could see again: someone sitting beside me, a girl, her hand on my forehead.
She said, "Are you feeling better?" Then the Chinaman said something in his language, and she replied in that language, and he laughed. His laugh, this time, resembled a fart, like a Bronx cheer. She said, "Don't listen to him; he's just kidding."
A strand of her hair rested on the cushion. I took it in my hand and examined it: very straight, very fine, very black, and very very long. I looked up at her: she had the longest hair I had ever seen. It almost touched the ground. It looked like a magnificent vine. I blinked several times; I thought I might be hallucinating, on account of the drug the Chinaman had given me. I said, "You've got the longest hair, nicest hair I've ever seen."
She said, "Do you like it?"
I said, "It must be hard to shampoo."
She said, "I don't use shampoo."
I said, "You don't clean your hair?"
She explained the various methods of cleaning and grooming her hair; all of it involved no liquids at all; she said liquids kill your hair, especially the rain, and you should keep it dry at all times.
The Chinaman came said something and she replied, and he disappeared. Then he reappeared and gave her a cup of the same stinking concoction he had given me.
I cried, "Don't!"
She said, "Huh?"
"It's poison!" I cried.
"Don't be silly," she said. "It's don quai tea, it's delicious." And she brought the poison cup to her lips.
I stretched out my hand, trying to knock that cup aside, but I missed it and caught her hair instead. As I did this she got up, but I kept clinging to her hair, and a strange thing happened: it came off, every bit of it. I had suspected as much: such a set of long rambling locks could not have been real. But I must say I couldn't tell for sure, because I felt so dazed under the influence of that drug and might have been imagining things. I say this because, as soon as she got up and I took a good look at her minus fake hair, she looked exactly, but exactly, like my sister Zelda. I cried, "Zelda, it's you!"
She did not reply. She turned around and ran out of the room. I got up. I still felt dizzy, frail, but not as bad as before. I began to go after her, but the Chinaman, standing at the door, holding his teapot, blocked my exit. He told me to go back to sleep. I told him to step aside. He said again, "You go slee!" So I pushed him, and he fell, and dropped the teapot. It shattered, and the stinking tea spilled all over him, and he screamed like a maniac. He had been hurt, had broken a leg maybe, but I had no time to feel sorry for him. I stepped out of the apartment and into a dark corridor, still clutching the fake hair.
The girl had disappeared. I cried, "Zelda! Come back!" The Chinaman continued to scream, to scream stuff in his language. I stood there, contemplating my next move. I could barely see a thing. I could hear people murmuring, responding to his cries. I heard footsteps, a mob it sounded like, marching in my direction. I also heard a siren. Had someone called the police?
I ran to the end of the hall and up the stairs. I scrambled up three flights, to the top floor of the building. I tried to open the door to the roof, but it didn't give. The sirens had ceased, but the footsteps and the cries and the commotion did not. Soon they'd be here. I began to formulate an apology: I'm so sorry I had broken the man's leg; it had been an accident; I had seen my sister....
Then I noticed, to my left, a light, and a little girl, a really small girl, five or six years old, at the door of one of the apartments. I approached her. I said, "Hello, little girl."
But the thing is: I still felt fuzzy in the head, and I began to think that this little girl might not really be there, and that the police siren and the angry neighbors and everything else, even the Chinaman, even these locks I still clung to, might have been nothing but a hallucination.
"Hello, mister," said the little girl, and I got closer, to test her actual presence. She seemed to be there. I ruffled her hair.
I said, "Do you mind if I come in? Just for a couple of minutes. I'm feeling dizzy."
"I can't," she said. "Mama said not to let strangers in."
"I'm not a stranger," I said. "My name is Louis. And yours?"
"Didi," she said. "But my real name is Diana."
"Nice to meet you, Didi," I said, and shook her little hand. "See? I'm not a stranger anymore."
"Yes, you are," she said.
"I need to come in," I said. "Do you hear those all that noise? Those people are coming after me, to hurt me, to put me in jail."
"Are you a robber?" she said.
"I'm not a robber," I said.
"You look like a robber," she said.
"I'm not," I said. "I'm just a guy. I got stuck in an apartment on the second floor, and then, by mistake, I knocked over an old man and his teapot broke and he screamed and he called the police and the neighbors are mad at me. Let me in, just for a couple of minutes?"
She looked at the fake hair and said, "Did you steal that?"
I said, "No, no. This girl, you see, had it on her head, and I pulled it off by mistake and she ran off and I started running after her, to give it back to her, and then the old man--"
She interrupted me: "I have a doll."
"That's nice," I said.
"Her name is Lucy," she said. "But she's bald, because her hair got burned. I used to call her Matilda, but then I changed my mind. I don't like the name Matilda. Do you?"
"I once met a girl named Matilda," I said.
"Did you like her?" she said.
"Very much," I said.
"Can I take some of that hair," she said, "and to put on Lucy's head?"
A brilliant idea. "Let me in," I said, seeing, as in an acid flashback--I still had some of the Chinaman's drug in me--the head of my blind sister on the shoulders of that little girl, "and I'll give you all the hair you like."
