excitement unwanted and not

Hmm. Another earthquake. It seems appropriate, though not exactly seasonal. Just a little bump really.

Yesterday morning as I was getting ready to go interpret for some directors across town, I heard something crashing upstairs. I thought my Brazilian roommate, BR, must have dropped something, but when he didn’t respond to my “Everything okay?” I went up the stairs to see what had fallen. Our Taiwanese roommate, TR, had moved out a while ago. Well, moved out is maybe an overstatement. From how I understand the situation, and I actually am not interested in understanding it too well, at some point after the girl who lived here before me, who apparently was having an affair with TR, abruptly moved out, TR stopped paying rent to BR, and then became highly inaccessible—all of us are hardly around anyway and rarely run into each other, and all the contact information BR had for TR was his cell phone number—then completely disappeared for a while. Eventually he returned to start moving his stuff out but somehow never got around to getting all of it, always putting it off and promising also to pay off BR various other moneys he owes him. BR was getting more and more tense about the situation, tried to get his Taiwanese friends to negotiate with TR (who wouldn’t talk to them), and kept talking about getting the police, or just throwing the guy’s stuff out, or something. The net result up to yesterday was that after the guy had disappeared and neither paid his outstanding debts nor collected his belongings for a couple of weeks, BR found the key to a front door lock we hadn’t been using (there are, in very Taiwanese style, two front doors with three locks each) and decided to lock him out until he would negotiate.

So yesterday morning as I was getting ready to go out I heard something crashing upstairs, and walked up to see TR using a brick to smash in the upstairs glass door. I yelled at him to, I believe my words were, “Get the fuck out of here,” bilingually, for ease of understanding and as befitting someone who was about to go out interpreting for people, although I don’t know how to get “fuck” in there grammatically in Chinese, so it wasn’t as good an interpretation as it could have been. I think the message was successfully conveyed, but to little effect: all he did was look up at me with, if you can say this, a purposeful absence of expression, look down, and keep smashing the glass. My reaction was one hundred percent woman: I gave a yelp and started running downstairs. I happened to have my cell phone in my hand because I had just been sending a text message, and as I ran I tried to dial what I think is the number for the police, but it didn’t work—I don’t know if I dialed wrong or if the connection cut out in the stairs or what. I reached the first floor and started yelling to the doorman (yes, we have doormen. It’s not my fault. There are three of them on rotation and two of them are really nasty, if that makes it any better. Yesterday the nice one was on duty though). Still one hundred percent woman: my hands were shaking, I couldn’t control my voice, and my Chinese went all to hell. TR came down in the elevator to try to explain the situation from his point of view, which is that BR had actually been exploiting him, and to reassure me that it was not about me and he wouldn’t do anything to me, or something like that. I was not in such a sympathetic mood for some reason, though I was almost as upset about my own reaction as I was about the break-in. I mean, what if it had been about me? Loss of control is probably not such an effective way to deal with such a situation.

I’d called BR but his phone was out of order. The three of us went back up to see the damage; the glass was broken enough that you could get in to the apartment. This door faces out onto the verandah formed by the roof of the building below it (BR’s room is a roof-box); TR showed me another, metal, door in between the mouth of the stairs and the verandah. We walked into BR’s room through the smashed glass, TR still telling me that “It’s not a big deal, look, this is just a little broken thing, he’ll pay me back for it, I mean, I’ll pay him back for it” which seemed to be exactly the confusion at the root of the matter, and “it has nothing to do with you, he treated me so badly I can’t even say.” When he moved further into the room to go down the stairs I grabbed onto his shirt, pulled, and said, “You can’t go into the apartment.” One of the things that goes all to hell when I’m flipped out, apparently, is my directional verbs: I was standing in the apartment. It should have been “come into the apartment.” Obviously he could have broken free, but with the old doorman standing there (who despite the broken glass still seemed uncertain about the situation and was saying like a grandfather to a mischievous child, “You really shouldn’t do this”) it probably seemed like a bad idea. I sent them down the outside stairs, locked the outside door he’d shown me, and went down the front door to talk.

TR was sitting on a cabinet saying, “I need my medicine, there’s medicine in my room that I need.” Seeing as how he’d been gone for almost a month at least, I found this somewhat unlikely, but the doorman urged me to be compassionate. He wanted to go in himself, but I told him to tell me where it was and I’d get it for him. “It’s at the very very bottom of one of the big cardboard boxes,” he said. A question to the reader: do you put your medicine at the very very bottom of big cardboard boxes? I didn’t think so. Neither do I. But for some reason all I could think of was to go to his room and flip over the two big cardboard boxes full of his stuff, at the bottom of which there was, of course, no medicine. At this point I had a little over half an hour to get to somewhere that had been known to be almost half an hour away by taxi, and I couldn’t really think of what to do anyway. I guess I should have called the police at least to have a record, and to get his identity card information. Maybe. I don’t know what I should have done. I really didn’t want anything to do with it—I was wishing he’d chosen a better time and just gotten his stuff without flipping me out. I was also a little worried that now that I was clearly not being helpful, the next time he came and I wasn’t around he would, you know, give me a computer virus or erase my hard drive or something. I don’t know what I was worried about, is what I mean, I was worried in some vague way about my computer, site of everything precious, and my inability to calm down, and not so much about getting raped or something as about going around being nervous about getting raped. My mouth was sour and my stomach was acid.

I told TR to work it out with BR, thanked the doorman, closed the door, realized that I was too flipped out to take a shower (I just watched Psycho recently), made myself somewhat presentable, and left, looking both ways down the alley as I stepped out the door. It took me until the middle of the third film, I don’t know how many hours later, to feel more or less deflipped; and for the rest of the day I felt tired and on edge. Although the interpreting sessions went fine. Someone even came up to me after the Taiwanese-American-defender-of-Taiwan-who-doesn’t-speak-Chinese session and said, “Your Chinese versions of his answers made more sense than his answers did!” Which is probably not so good—surely the job of a good interpreter is to convey the person’s actual level of coherence—but it’s true that I am developing just a little bit of a face issue on the topic of interpreting, becoming somewhat resistant to translating incoherence into incoherence lest people mistake what has been retained in translation for what has been lost. After that session, it was time for Agnes Varda’s lecture. I am totally uneducated and so know nothing about her except that she is very famous and that she is here in Taiwan for this event, but I figured sitting still for another hour or two wouldn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt, and I found out that her uncle was friends with Henry Miller, which, you know, when you hear Henry Miller your day just gets better.

And following the lecture there was a little festival party which culminated in almost twenty of us, including a bunch of the foreign directors, some of the guides in charge of foreign directors, and me somehow stumbling over to a karaoke place (what’s known as a KTV) and renting a room and having what I must honestly say was the most fun I’ve ever had singing -- not in terms of the fun but in terms of the singing -- even though the Wu Bai song I wanted to sing never came up (Wu Bai is the Bruce Springsteen of Taiwan). I don’t know exactly what it was about the singing, whether it was the fact that everyone there either was or was acting more drunk that I was, that I had been carrying the weird stress of shock the whole day and needed to find somewhere to put it down, or that the weird stress of shock had shot my appetite and I was drinking vodka on more or less an empty stomach, but I have never sung with such abandon before. Now, of course, I want to go to KTV every night. It's completely addictive. Over the course of the evening not one, not two, but three of the directors invited me back to their hotel rooms, which, as market analysts will note, marks a roughly 300% jump in propositions in the waning days of the fiscal year. All three were Spanish-speakers, one from Mexico and two from Spain; so I guess I’ve found my target audience.

When I got home a bit after three (having been the one to make sure that the bill was settled properly and everyone who didn’t speak the language knew how to get where they needed to go—why? since when am I the responsible one? what a dumb role), I saw that the stuff I’d dumped out of TR’s boxes, and the boxes themselves, were gone. I figured that BR had heard what had happened and got rid of them, but this morning it turns that all that BR knew was that his door was broken and TR’s stuff was gone. Probably the second door on the verandah was breakable or jumpable. I haven’t been up to check. I feel a lot less nervous now that the guy’s stuff is out of here; I do think all he wanted was to get his stuff without having to pay BR the money he owes him. It’s all one more nail in the coffin of being pretty happy to be going back to the States for a change. But I do think it’s pretty funny that this happens here, in my high class building with doormen in a very expensive, very safe area, while when I lived in the poor, dangerous area, all my neighbors knew exactly who was coming and going in the building and would tell me if I’d missed something important. The only problem I ever had with apartment entry there was when I accidentally locked my own keys in the bucket under my scooter seat and a kid from the gas station down the street took off from work at a clip to pry it open for me.