His left hand in his pocket, his right hand holding his gaunt backpack slung on his right shoulder, his upper-body leaned forward of his hops, his legs rapidly moving as if he needed to get somewhere quick, the man in the huge glasses on his face was lost in thoughts. When he got to his little, rusty bike that had seen many owners on its worn-out seat, he paused a little, then with his right hand he let lose the bag and it glided down his right arm. That way he was able to go through the outer pocket in search of his bike key. It was one of many keys on that massive chain of metal, making as always a familiar sound that reminded him of the little importance he carried in his profession in which he had access to many important rooms, even if they were just classrooms at the university.
After unlocking his bike and putting away the lock that had no lock holder to return to on the bike, he towed the biked to the intersection where he looked left and right with some small but noticeable degree of anxiety. It isn't that he was troubled; he has always been like this. He had been living in this university city for nearly three years, but he had never made any real friendship. There were many other Chinese scholars in the university, and a growing number too, and often people see these scholars in large groups, frolicking, chattering, sometimes bickering, though without knowing their language the others often don't know if they are angry or just playing. But he was never part of this or any other group. The only people he spoke to were his supervisor, his collaborators every now and then, and of course, his Mother. He talked to his Mother nearly everyday. They more or less alternate calling each other at the same time every evening when he just got out of work and she was about to start her day on the other side of the planet.
And that was what he was about to do now. He was going home, to his little apartment near what they all warned as the bad neighborhood. And when he got there he would lock his door, put his bag down, turn on the home computer, check the sound, and call his Mother. He was, as it was usually the case in China for people of his age, the only child, but unlike most families of single child under the single-child policy, his family lacked a father. The old man died when he was quite young, but he remembered him as old. So since high school he had spent his years with his Mother and the books. Not having even Chinese friends is a phenomenon that dated back beyond his arrival here. So that was the predictable future that awaited him at the end of his 12 minute bike ride up the hills on the road that separated the university from the shoddy neighborhood that was dark in all the ways he could think of.
"Dark" not only in the dilapidation and gloomy aura of the neighborhood, but also of the skin color of the people there. He didn't always live alone. In fact, to save money, as his financially astute Mother had advised him before he even bought his first ticket to the United States, he roomed with as many people as it was possible. But quickly things got sour; he was simply not sociable enough for most people and he found them as annoying as they had found him. Against his Mother's wishes, which caused immense pain in him, he decided to get a place on his own. The cheapest place within the university "safe" zone was on this road that formed the outer boarder. He often felt like he was biking down a walled border, something he had seen in the newspaper in some places in the world where human beings are collectively walled in by some other government. But he was never interested in politics, especially not of other countries.
He was interested in physics. And often he would be thinking about it, the equations, the problems he faced that required absolute silence to have any chance of find the solutions to. More than a few times he nearly got hit by cars while biking up the hill thinking about the problems left unresolved in the day. But today his mind was somewhere else.
He noticed the buildings around him as he was biking up. He noticed the texture of the walls, the colors that make up what he had always thought was solid color surfaces. He noticed that, just as physics would predict, things closer to him appeared to move faster than the things farther. Simple physics. He also noticed how hard it was to bike up this hill that he had been biking up for the past two years since living alone. Through his huge glasses he had gotten from China while in graduate school, he could see the colors of the little leaves coming out of the naked branches on this warm, spring evening. He imagined the wavelength numbers for that particular green, even though he was not an optics physicist. He was, certainly, a proud physicist, one whose lack of proficiency in the English language more than made up by his ingenuity when they considered him for a fellowship here at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, whose physics department has few competitions known to mankind.
And his mother knows that and often told him how proud she was, and then she would get all weepy about how proud his father would have been. After years of the same pattern of words he had gotten desensitized by those words or the tears he couldn't see over the phone. And lately he would dread hearing it again when he called her. But now, on this late spring, warm evening, he wasn't thinking about his mother either, or her repetitive, predictable melancholy and self-pity.
He was thinking about a dead cactus. It was on the window sill of his small office where a chalkboard was still in place instead of the dry-erase board found in nearly every department of the university. And surrounding the dead cactus is the mess of his papers, journals, scribbled equations, and notes. Only the bookcase of thick books bore any resemblance towards order there. The cactus, when it was alive, did not express order, but something more intangible for him. One day he sat for more than an hour staring at the cactus. It was very small. It sat on a pot the size of a Yolait yogurt container, and that pot is a shiny silver metal pot. The cactus itself had a green trunk just a little taller and thicker than his thumb, and on the top is a big, round red bulb of a flower.
He was now using his right hand to help his right leg pedal up the hilly border road. He had never had to do this. But for some reason he felt a need to. At least his body needed to. His mind was too focused on the cactus. The poor prickly cactus. It was now totally unrecognizable from when it was alive. It was bent over like an old man too tired and weak to prostrate himself. The vivid green body was now a sad, sickly jaundice yellow, and the glorious red that had once defined its pride was now a rotting, shrunken knob like a raisin but covered with moldy substance. He noticed it today. The transformation was fast. It started looking sad a few days ago, but within two days it shrank and collapsed under its own weight. But he had done nothing, just watched the inevitable death. He was silent when he watched it, but he tried to forget about it when he was busy solving equations for an upcoming paper.
"Don't water more than once a month!"
He hadn't been keeping track, but he knew it had been less than a month since he had last watered it. And yet, he was afraid it would die from dehydration now that winter was gone and spring was here to make plants open up their pores and let air go through. He wanted the cactus, so innocent and cute, to live forever, but it died in his hand ending a four-month relationship.
He said nothing much except, "Thank you." He wasn't sure if he even said more than those two words. He wasn't used to someone giving him all this attention, not a woman, and even less, a black woman. She was from Kenya; he knew because she told him he was going back to Kenya and was selling things or getting rid of them. She had had this little cactus plant for nearly a year and she wanted someone to take care of it.
She talked a lot that one encounter.
He was shocked that she was talking to him. He was at some large garage sale organized by an entire apartment building in the heart of the scholar community, away from the peripheral where he was living alone. He was looking for a bargain though he wouldn't be ready to bargain at all. But then a very peculiar but charming voice grabbed his attention. Through his huge, thick glasses, the man, who had never combed his hair in his life, hardly shaved during the year, and still had visible scars from his puberty years of acne, saw a smile like he had never seen before directed at him. Her skin was dark but had a beautiful bronze luster, her hair was straightened and reflected a glitter in the cold wintry sun. But what he found most beautiful was her face, the acute lines that defined her nose, her cheek bones, as if all was just a context to pay homage to her amazing, big brown eyes. Her teeth, as shown so obvious in the smile that caught him by surprise, were perfect. She introduced herself to him, though he didn't say anything when shaking her soft hands. He had never looked at a black woman for so long and was very curious to see how different she was from the phantom black people that roamed on the other side of the road and often trespass into his neighborhood in troubling raids. He had never actually seen any of these trouble makers, but he had overheard and read stories condemning them and the rest of the lot. But now he was standing in front of and looking at a black woman from a country he wouldn't be able to locate on the map. She was warm and enthusiastic about talking to him. She was obviously very excited to go back home after three years here. But she was in a hurry so she got to the point of getting his attention.
She showed him the cactus plant. He had never seen something so small in real life. She said she thought he might like a plant. Why? He didn't know, he didn't ask and didn't wonder. He was drunk in the attention given to him. He didn't want to talk but for that moment he wanted her to talk the entire time, even if he didn't understand every word she said because she was speaking very fast and with a slight accent that he was unfamiliar to. When she asked if he would be interested, he nodded.
He never saw her again. It was just those five or seven minutes of a man listening attentively and a woman speaking very quickly. But he thought about her every day for the past four months, especially when he was looking at the cactus, which he carried and walked to his office one day instead of going there in his usual style of biking. He placed it on the sunniest spot because he thought about the desert, and sometimes Africa, which was for him a sunny hot place. They never exchanged any contact info, so he couldn't hear from her or write to her about the cactus. But everyday since she put in his hands the little plant with her dark hands with pink palms, he had thought about what to tell her that day, and imagined what she would say in return.
But today it was a devastating day. He sat there for ten minutes, watching the frozen, death state of the cactus, and his whole existence went blank. He had walked out of his fleshy shell and into an infernal where his soul, his mind, his heart had disintegrated into vapor. He had no one to tell this to. He didn't have her, and his Mother never learned about the cactus, let alone the exotic woman who had given it to him in a casual manner that he considered the most intimate he had ever felt. He was able to blank out his mind for so long before he had to go out into the enclosed courtyard to which his window faced. There he sat for half an hour, smoking his own thoughts, trying to taste them before wasting them.
And now he was biking home, again. And yet, he felt sorry for himself, more than any other time in his life. He felt utterly lonely with his own preoccupations. He felt his whole body was a dead weight, even his glasses now seemed to bear down his mind, flattening his bike tires even more. He looked around him a little more. He noticed the bolts and naked steel rods on a building the wealthy university was putting up with its nearly bottomless endowments. The true, internal nature of this building before the facade was to be put up seemed so sad and raw to him. The rough surfaces, the yellow hues of the rusty rods, the chaos clearly visible to any passerby, all seemed immensely tragic and realistic to him. He felt like this building that was receding from his vision, he felt incomplete, abandoned, and worse, his skin had been ripped away and the thirty-five years of sadness completely exposed to the elements of the world that had never shown any unattached sympathy for anyone.
He stopped by the curb, and started to rub the dull surface of the handlebar of his bike, feeling with whatever faculty left in him the surface of one of the few things that had stayed with him, this broken old bike.
