I Don't Recognize You

I’m in that position on the wheel of cell phone life where battery power begins to disappear so quickly you walk about with at all times a chord at hand, plotting your day as a series of charging sessions.  The phone is charging through cable from my lap top.  But it is also powering the wifi.  This hotel’s wifi seems to episodically bounce me off my VPN.  The phone as a hotspot is more reliable.  But this seems to require the same amount of charge that a phone can intake from the computer per minute.  IT’s charging . . . but no charge is being stored. 

Arriving at the corner I’d specified.  I don’t recognize anything.  I head off in the wrong direction and realize the same mistake I’d made the last time I was dropped off here.  Now I recall.  There’s an entrance to a yard fifty meters that way, past the plane tree up ahead.  The guard should be outside sprawled in a chair, sleeping.  And it is so. 

I meander along, guided by instinct and come to a cul de sac.  Checking the house number in my phone it is obvious now that I have proceeded down a wrong alley. I notice that my phone has dropped to single digits of charge to spare.  Retracing my mistake, I twist down another block in this atmospheric collection of little apartments I’ve only ever seen in the dark.  I reach their place and give my friend’s a call.  I give them a wechat message.  A call.  A wechat.  I consider yelling.  It’s extremely hot out this evening and every window is closed including the one that has the people I want to hear me up there on the third floor. 

Call.  We chat.  Think.  I ring the bell.  I think it’s their bell.  An older lady comes down.  I explain the situation.  I say I know the folks on the third floor.  I describe them.  She reasonably replies that this is all very nice but she doesn’t recognize me and so she will not be able to let me in.  I don’t recognize you, she repeats.  She’s right. What could I say?

I text my friends that my phone is about to die.  I imagine throwing in the towel and cabbing it back home.  My phone is now dead.  I’ve nowhere to charge it.  Disconnected, I look up to see a light on that wasn’t on before.  Now my friend had come to the first floor and let me in. 

Later that evening on my way out, I saw the women who wouldn’t let me in.  I made sure I gave hear a hearty “ni hao” from the inside.  An affable grunt, one hopes, she’ll remember.

Monday, 7/31/17