Same As It Ever Was

MurderWeasel · #1

"You really got shot, huh. I still can't quite believe it."

As he spoke, Alex Liao gently traced the callused fingertips of his right hand over the tangled web of scar tissue that comprised much of Kimberly's left shoulder. His left hand splayed across her lower belly, thumb hooked into her navel, as they lay in bed in his cramped Sham Shui Po apartment, the rattling fan across the room the only relief from the heat and humidity of Hong Kong in mid-June.

"It was a long time ago," Kimberly said, her tone neutral.

She was trying to be fair about this. She wasn't quite succeeding. A month or two ago, this was a big part of what she found so charming and attractive about Alex: he had, at best, a loose conception of who she was. He knew, of course, about the SOTF attacks, had some vague idea that 2008 had been a turning point, was familiar with the fact that multiple people had been rescued, but that was about as far as it went. It wasn't that he wasn't interested, so much as that it had been a decade ago, a different time in his life just as much as hers, and the focus it got here was different from how it played out in the United States. People got the gist, and then they forgot. Life moved on, especially for those who weren't affected. That had seemed exactly what she needed.

He'd been really impressed when he'd figured out that she had her own Wikipedia page, but not enough to read it. That had been charming and attractive too.

"It's just so crazy," he said.

He was behind her, holding her in a gentle embrace. It was familiar by now, and she had to admit it was pleasant, even with the sour anger that these little innocuous missteps now stoked within her. She liked him. They had a lot in common. He was also a musician, played bass in a local band that had changed names twice in the roughly three months she'd been here and ran the gamut in style from punk to rock to a sort of new wave vibe. He was also from a mixed heritage, born to a native Hong Kong father and a Scottish mother, and had never fit in anywhere all that well and never particularly wanted to. He was also the sort of person who didn't give much of a fuck about anybody else's rules. He was skinny in a fit sort of way, wore his dark hair in that in-between spot where it was too short to be truly long but far too long to be respectable, and when he smiled the left half of his mouth went twice as high as the right. They'd hit it off immediately, the sort of connection Kimberly hadn't felt in a very long time.

He didn't realize it yet, but this was the last night like this they would share. Tomorrow morning, when he left for work, Kimberly would vanish from his life like a ghost, never to be seen again.

It was easier, Kimberly thought, to deal with the flaws of a country besides your own. It wasn't that the issues facing a foreign nation were necessarily smaller or less important than those back home, but they felt far less personal.

From the first days of her stay in Hong Kong, she was bombarded by discussions and opinions, from locals and expats alike. There was a cloud of concern in the air, whispers about slipping freedom of speech, media censorship, slanted elections. The disappearance of the Causeway Bay booksellers was still fresh and raw. People who'd lived here for decades, who remembered the British handover that Kimberly thought she could maybe faintly recall watching on television with her grandparents when she was seven, were talking about leaving.

But the possible erosion of the One Country, Two Systems principle just didn't feel like a betrayal in the same way the total abdication of moral responsibility of the American voting public did. And for every flaw or horrifying revelation, there was a funhouse mirror held to the norms she took for granted that cast them in an entirely new light.

They sold toy guns without orange tips here, openly in the windows of hobby stores. They were replicas so realistic they had at first fooled Kimberly, replicas much like the one she'd picked off the ground at a ruined sawmill half a lifetime ago and clung to as if it held actual power, and yet nobody was at all worried about them. Nobody had real guns except the police, so there was no baked-in cultural fear of getting shot in some petty escalation. There was no cloud of threatened violence over even benign personal interactions, and when that finally sank in it was liberating in a way unlike anything she'd felt in years.

"The triads do that to them," explained the young man walking beside Kimberly, an aspiring actor from New Zealand who was making a living taking bit roles in commercials and episodes of local television dramas, while running a video blog he referred to as "his show" on the side. As best Kimberly could ascertain, the primary qualification for the paid parts was being Caucasian and willing to show up for shoots that frequently ran ten to fourteen hours. Despite the four inches he had on her, he lagged a step behind, and his girlfriend—a boisterous woman whose parents came from the mainland—playfully tugged at him, urging him to hurry up. "It's over gambling debts."

"Really," Kimberly said.

The subject of discussion was a withered man prostrate on the aerial walkway that ran from the pier to the IFC. Both of his hands had been amputated, and he held the stumps of his wrists together in a gesture akin to prayer, silently beseeching the passers-by as he bowed his head far enough forward to touch the ground. Beside him was a small burgundy cloth, upon which a few coins lay. His hold on Kimberly's attention was magnetic, despite his relative silence compared to the surroundings; it was Saturday, and regardless of the overcast weather the walkways and bridges were jam-packed with Indonesian au pairs nestled in tight circles of discussion crudely delineated with improvised walls fashioned from cardboard boxes. None of the locals paid the mutilated man the slightest bit of attention. Kimberly didn't stare, but she also didn't avoid looking his way. The skin at the ends of his arms was tight and shiny.

"Mm hm." The actor was pleasant, charming, but just a little bit full of himself. Kimberly had met him on her third day in the city, half a week ago now, and he'd immediately tried to take her under his wing, but she wasn't sure if it was because of who he was or who she was. His name was Richie, but he shortened it to Rich. It sorely tested Kimberly's commitment to respecting the preferences of vaguely decent people when it came to their names.

"It is," insisted his girlfriend, who Kimberly had been introduced to a couple hours ago but whose name she had managed to forget in the meantime ("Super easy, rhymes with 'Shrek,'" Rich had said, and that was all that stuck).

"They have to bring in a certain amount of money," Rich continued. "And if they can't round it up any other way, they have to beg. And if the begging isn't working out, well, maybe people would be more charitable to someone without any hands."

"I see," Kimberly said. She didn't say that the story struck her as unlikely, and possibly racist in some fashion. She didn't say it all sounded like a convenient excuse to ignore someone's plight and write it off as righteous, to cast the blame upon the victim and paint him as a degenerate and a criminal. She didn't know enough to start that fight. Not yet.

"It's also a warning," Rich explained. "A mark. You see someone like that, you want to know what happened to them. People talk. People learn what it costs if you don't pay your debts."

They came closer to the man, but did not slow their pace as they passed him by. Kimberly's stomach twisted, and she wondered whether she ought to do more. She wondered if the impulse was more related to the man's plight, to being the type of person she chose to be, or to quietly shoving her opinions in Rich's face. Unable to quickly figure it out, she did not turn around or dig in her pocket for change.

The end of the walkway was ahead, truncating in an escalator, and as they lined up Kimberly felt another little spike of irritation. Here, everyone stood on the right side of the escalator, leaving the left open for those who wished to walk past. It was simple, efficient, universal. It had taken her less than a day to adopt the habit, and while escalators figured in her life at the moment far more than at any point prior, she couldn't help but remember how in most of her past experiences attempting to walk on an escalator had been a futile endeavor, stymied by inconsistent spacing and families standing abreast so as to block the way.

"We're almost there," Rich said, redundantly. They'd walked this route for the last three days, and Kimberly felt another spark of annoyance, but again she kept a lid on it. He was trying to help, and justwasn't consistently good at it.

That was something she knew a thing or two about herself.

Two or three times a week, Kimberly came to the Dragon Center for lunch. Once, the nine-story mall had apparently been a hub of activity. Now, it lay partially dormant, with periodic spikes at peak hours but many storefronts sitting close to abandoned.

The architecture gripped her. Each floor was more a wide walkway, circling a shaft that ran from top to bottom of the structure, with a glass-walled elevator jutting into the middle. At the top of the building, hanging suspended over this almost hundred-foot plunge, was a roller coaster, though it was silent and had by all accounts not been in operation in over a decade. This fixture, alongside a still-operational ice skating rink through which its tracks ran, reminded Kimberly of home like nothing else in the city. It could have been a vision of the future, as crowds at the Promenade and the Mall of America dried up and left those centers of commerce just so much more decaying urban blight. Maybe she was giving too much credit. Maybe they were already there. It had been a long time since she'd spent a day at the mall prior to her hurried departure.

The food court, at least, remained popular. Also located on the upper level, it offered a mix of local and more Western-friendly fare, a pizza place sitting across from a handful of restaurants where every piece of signage was in Chinese characters she couldn't read. A Japanese-style curry restaurant made for a decent occasional treat, but most of the time Kimberly paired a cardboard cup of hot and sour soup from one of the local places with a tartly sweet grapefruit yakult drink from the ComeBuy near the entrance. This ran her around twenty-eight Hong Kong dollars, or roughly four USD.

She would sit at the wooden tables and tune out the hum of conversation and the buzz of television programs (usually extremely low budget productions; she was pretty sure she'd seen pieces of an adaptation of Journey To The West that would've made the special effects on the public access TV she'd grown up with seem high tech on at least half of her visits, always the same bit where a man in unconvincing monkey makeup transformed into a whirlwind and launched himself at his foe). Aside from her very first visit, when Alex had been giving her the lay of the land, she always came alone. It let her blend into the masses and disappear into anonymity. It didn't matter that most of those here could tell at a glance that she didn't fit in. She was distinct not for who she was, but for what she wasn't—one of the only non-locals to frequent the court.

From time to time, her gaze would be drawn inevitably towards the drop, shielded only by a waist-high glass safety wall. She would find herself wondering if anyone had ever jumped off, and, perhaps more pertinently, whether anyone had ever been thrown over.

It was probably telling that Kimberly had never properly unpacked her bags.

They were two large, wheeled suitcases, one black and the other dark grey, and they sat off to one side in Alex's apartment, partially impeding access to his closet. They held just about everything she owned, or at least everything she hadn't left with her grandparents when she terminated the lease on her apartment in Saint Paul. She'd been living out of them for the better part of two years, now, and had come to know them well, could squeeze in an extra set of pants and knew just where the most pressure could be applied without causing them to pop open. She was a pro when it came to dragging them both along with her, had it all figured out even when she had to deal with crowded buses or narrow staircases. In a whole lot of ways, they were home now.

While the bags were unchanging, their contents were decidedly fluid, with a few exceptions. Kimberly's laptop had held true across enough countries she was starting to seriously consider a passport addendum, its typical charging cord and wireless mouse joined by a universal adapter so she could actually use outlets that differed from what they had back in the States. Her wardrobe was in a constant state of flux, as socks and underwear wore out and pants got holes and shirts lost buttons or saw seams unravel, but one faded denim jacket had been with her the whole way. Her look surprised people who met her, sometimes; they expected gloom and affectation that hadn't been her norm for almost a decade, while nowadays when she bothered to dress up with real intent she aimed for something closer to Patti Smith on the cover of Horses.

She had little keepsakes from here and there, but they had a habit of passing to her various hosts. A small brass Eiffel Tower was on top of the cabinet in the corner, the one Alex's bass leaned against. Kimberly had paid a disheveled man on the streets near Notre Dame two Euros for the knickknack, and hadn't been able to bring herself to care when she was later told it had likely been shoplifted from one of the nearby gift shops that sold the same thing at twice the price.

Always, there were books.

Most people around her age who she met thought her habit of using hard copy travel guides incredibly quaint, when so much more was available at the touch of a screen. But Kimberly didn't have a smart phone, and changed her burner every month or so. She didn't trust the phone companies, she explained, or the government. What government? Any of them, anyone that might have some reason to want to track her movements. It was a futile gesture in a world where you were increasingly under passive surveillance by virtue of the connectedness of those around you, but her ideological stands had never been about practicality.

While the guidebooks saw regular service, the novels she bought and inherited and passed along and abandoned on benches were also a constant rotation. She always had at least four or five on hand, just in case she got stranded in an airport or hit a dry spell somewhere and was left without an English language bookstore to fall back upon. Since arriving in Hong Kong, her primary stop had been an incredibly cramped, crowded second-story shop named Flow which adorned each book or CD which passed through its doors with a hand-drawn symbol, something like a yin-yang without the circle surrounding it. She felt more comfortable amidst the towers of worn novels than she did when she stepped into Dymocks and was confronted with rows of perfectly neat, brand new books in shrink wrap so it was impossible to leaf through them.

Her selection of toiletries was disposable and ever-changing. Sometimes the airports made her discard bottles of shampoo or razors or nail clippers. Mostly they did not. She'd been shocked at just how lax security felt in many other countries, and how much safer that made her feel. On the other hand, her welcome to her week-long stop prior to this was a sign with giant block letters reading "WARNING: DEATH FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW." It had been a long, long time since Kimberly did anything she didn't have a prescription for, but all the same it made her tense, threw her right back to those months dating a boy who seemed to make it his goal to sample every hallucinogen he could get his hands on, to her nervous walks home with dilated pupils as she tried to work out whether it would be worse if her grandparents didn't notice or did and chose not to do anything.

She always kept some food, a bag of trail mix and some jerky in case she needed energy, and hard candies in case the pressure of takeoff or landing got to her. Never granola bars.

In her day to day life, she took things out of the bags only as much as she needed to. Her clothes migrated out over the week as she wore them, but after laundry day she folded them back into their places. Her toothbrush, which saw daily use, lived in a cup in the bathroom. Her nail clippers, which came into play once a week at most, did not.

She was always ready to leave at any moment, and told herself that it was because that meant that every moment she stayed was by choice.

"They're looking for you, you know," Thuan Nguyen said. He sounded weary, old in a way that made Kimberly deeply uncomfortable. He was in his seventies now. She would be twenty-eight soon. She wasn't ready for this. There was supposed to be more time, a generation in between to show the way and ease the burdens, and there was, but it wasn't the same connection as in most families. It wasn't the same at all.

Maybe she was just edgy and gloomy because of what had happened two days ago. This time, the missing class was from Tennessee. She felt none of the magnetic pull that had dragged her to Arizona three years ago. Maybe she'd gotten what she'd needed back then. Maybe she held more deep-seated prejudices about the South than she cared to admit. Likely she was just too stubborn to ever consider backing down from a statement as strong as her self-imposed exile.

"I'm sure they are," Kimberly said.

"They think, mostly, you're still in France." A pause, a sigh. "They have many questions."

"They never want to hear the answers."

She was glad that Alex was out. Some things, she had no interest in explaining, and the bitterness that permeated her tone whenever the media came up was high on that list.

"They come every time," Kimberly continued, "because they forget. I tell the truth, and nobody wants to hear that. Not unless they can twist it or try to discredit it."

There was no immediate response. This was an old refrain, and one of the subjects on which she and her grandfather did not see eye to eye. Over the years, she had come to accept that his reluctance to truly engage her in a disagreement was neither cowardice nor apathy, but respectful support. It didn't always feel that way, but she had learned to curb her temper, to avoid lashing out abruptly. It was the right choice, so she made it as often as she could.

"It's about the actor piece," her grandfather finally said. "Someone on the radio said some things, apparently, like you predicted. They want to know what you think."

"Tell them to find me and ask in person," Kimberly said. "I prefer to see someone's face when I tell them to go fuck themselves."

He sighed, but then chuckled.

"Be safe," he said, "be well. I know you think they have no further interest in you, but I always worry."

"I know." The petty rage drained away easily, water through her fingers. She shifted, coming out of her head a little. She was tangled up in the sheets, head facing the foot of the bed, looking blankly over a mound of laundry on the floor. The bathroom door was open, lights on, inviting. She'd been getting ready to shower when the call came, to get dressed and properly start the day, but here she was in bed at noon, still wearing a nightie.

"I know you think it's nothing," he said, "but one of them is named—"

"It is nothing," Kimberly cut in. "And if it isn't, it's to get exactly that reaction."

In 2012, it had been a girl named Kathryn. That was about all Kimberly knew, but her grandparents had become anxious, certain that it was some coded message. When 2015 came and went without a repeat, they'd grudgingly accepted Kimberly's professed theory that it was coincidence, though she herself had never believed it. By the sound of things, that was over. Some other girl was dying as a sentence in a one-sided argument.

"They just want to scare me," she explained. "That's the only way they can bring me back, and only if I let them. They hate that I have a life besides it. They hate that they didn't destroy me."

She'd really pissed somebody off back then, that was what Kimberly had come to realize. She could hazard a guess, but it wasn't worth the mental energy. Whatever the game at play, she was winning simply by opting out.

One of the many things that Alex would never know was that he had actually completely sabotaged his chances of getting what he wanted through their very pursuit. His ultimate goal was within his grasp, and all it would've taken to reach it was to shut up and do nothing.

Three weeks after he met Kimberly, two after she first crashed at his place after an evening out dancing, and one after she accepted his offer to avoid paying hotel prices and dumped her suitcases in front of his closet, he asked whether she might reconsider her plans for the summer.

"I was thinking," he explained, "that, if you wanted, you could stay another three months. You can stay here. We can go over to Macau for a day, see the sights, get your visa renewed."

At this stage of the relationship, that had not been the sort of thing to piss Kimberly off, because he hadn't known any better. It was a generous offer, made in a positive spirit, and it spoke to his growing fondness for her—a feeling she reciprocated. And yet, at the same time, the warning signs had been there. The embers had been stoked, the flame of rage whispered to. She was able to be rational, to step back and examine her feelings, to identify the problem and then rectify it. It was unfair to get upset, because Alex didn't understand. Therefore, it was time he be educated.

"No." Kimberly shook her head, smiling softly. They were having curry and samosas in a restaurant/bar on top of one of the piers. It was the sort of place that looked very fancy and expensive but was not. The pot of curry rested between them, as each dipped the heartier part of the meal into it in turn.

Kimberly had been nursing a beer. Her drinking habits were the source of much amusement to the expat friends she'd made, who joked that she'd gone native—the only beers she had much taste for were Tsingtao ("The Official State Beer Of China," and her beverage tonight), Lucky Buddha, and this unknown local off-brand called Blue Ice. Aside from that, she'd sometimes have a glass of unfiltered sake or a can of this malted pineapple beverage seemingly sold only in a handful 7-11s on Lantau Island, which had just enough alcohol that the US would've carded for it. She never had more than one drink, never got drunk. Hadn't since before she was of legal age.

Alex's eyebrows came together, but he smiled at the same time, more on the left.

"It wouldn't even have to be the full three months," he started. When he spoke, he had a faint accent Kimberly identified as kin to British, but when he sang he sounded all American. It was good enough for the Beatles, he'd explained, and Kimberly had laughed and found more respect because he knew that. "You could just—"

She held up a finger, caught his gaze, and gave him her stare. It tended to make people very uncomfortable very quickly, but after a couple weeks spending so much time in each other's presence, it didn't work quite that way on Alex anymore. He got the message anyways, though, and he shut up without her having to verbally cut him off.

"Moving around is important to me," Kimberly explained. "My plans are important to me. That doesn't mean they can never change. But whatever we have—however nice this is—I'm going to go somewhere else."

She smiled and tilted her head, releasing him without breaking eye contact.

"I don't like feeling pressured, so don't ask me again."

"Alright," Alex said, chuckling. He raised his own glass, clinked it against hers. "To the eight weeks left, then."

"Until June." Kimberly nodded, and drank.

But in retrospect, those were poor words, because it wasn't just June. It was mid-June, the sixteenth. Alex kept his word until the eleventh, and right up until that point, everything was great.

In fact, things went so well that Kimberly had just about changed her mind. She liked Alex. She genuinely cared about him, thought their chemistry was good. They had fun together. Whatever happened, there would be memories. She wasn't planning to stay forever, but even as she promised herself that, there was conflict, as she told herself another three months wouldn't hurt but also that it was such a slippery slope, a quarter of a year at a time. Alex wasn't perfect. He didn't understand why she was so edgy and irritable, but it was okay. Nobody was perfect. Kimberly never planned to get married. Alex claimed the same, and mostly she believed him.

"I've been thinking," he said, as they cuddled on the small sofa in the apartment's sitting room, music washing over them (some local psychedelic band, Jefferson Airplane wannabes [and who would want to be Jefferson Airplane?] but Alex loved it and Kimberly had to admit there was a certain charm), "what about if we go to Macau in a couple days and just... leave our options open. You can renew your visa, see how you feel."

Kimberly didn't tense, or pull away, or snarl at him. She'd been through too much for that, far too much for something like this to shatter her, even today, but it still felt like she'd been stabbed. She knew the fares for the ferry. Had it all planned out. Had for half a week now. Hadn't said a word, but she'd been just about ready to trust.

"We'll see," she said, smiling sadly and shaking her head, "but no promises."

It was at this moment she knew that in forty-eight hours she would be gone.

All Alex had to do, she told herself again and again as she screamed in the desert at nothing a month later when she finally unraveled it all, was to shut up. He could've said nothing. She was ready to stay. She'd decided. Or, or if he wanted to push the issue, he could've offered to come with her. That would have won her forever, or close enough. It was insane and impractical. Alex had a job, a band, an apartment, a life, all in Hong Kong. Kimberly had two suitcases and the ability to somehow always scrape together the resources to send her off somewhere new. She would've never let him give up everything to follow her on her crazy journey, but knowing that he was willing to, that he cared that much? It would've meant the world.

Was it that hard, Alex? Was it so fucking hard to read between the lines and trust?

"You know," said Kimberly's therapist, whose name she had chosen to forget years ago, "when you lay traps for people, it isn't exactly... fair."

Kimberly was sitting in a too-well-padded chair, trying to keep a lid on just how little respect she had for the young woman across from her. They were talking about her meeting with Brendan Wallace. Kimberly was of the opinion that it had gone quite well. Her therapist didn't quite see it that way.

"I'm not trying to be 'fair,'" Kimberly said. "I don't give a fuck about being 'fair.' I'm getting what I want."

"Do you think people will respect you more for that?"

"I really don't care." Kimberly sat as still as she could during therapy, to offer fewer details to analyze. She'd picked this woman, fresh out of grad school, in part due to the suspicion that it would make pushing the envelope easier. Less than two months ago, Kimberly had been playing word games with the mastermind of an international terrorist organization. However that had turned out, a twenty-something psychology student stood no chance. The best she could do was pick up on words Kimberly used a lot and try to bring them back into play. "Fair" was one of those words.

"Why not?"

"I've never cared." Kimberly shrugged. Then, realizing she'd left an opening, she abruptly swerved the conversation, leaving no chance to capitalize and turn discussion to her past. "Besides, even if fairness did matter, I don't think I'm too far from the mark."

"Oh?"

The woman took notes, sometimes, but whenever she was writing, Kimberly made sure to let her tone get significantly more hostile. This had pretty successfully reduced the amount of scribbling, and at particularly dramatic moments the woman now never reached for the pen.

"I'm not asking my best friend to fake seduce my boyfriend or something," Kimberly said. "I don't make people do anything. I just let them. I don't head it off, that's all. If they're going to fuck up, I let them fuck up because if that's who they are I'd rather know."

"Don't you think that sometimes people can be changed by their circumstances? That, perhaps, by letting someone know that they might hurt you, you can avoid them doing that?"

"No," Kimberly said. She made her voice flat and matter of fact. "I don't. People pretend. If I warn them, they won't truly change. They'll just placate me. I'll never know who they are. If I'm going to trust them, I need to know that they don't need me to draw them a map to basic decency."

It was funny how this came back almost verbatim, so long after the fact. Kimberly had always been good at that, really good at it. Words floated through her head on repeat, the voices familiar, the intonation just so, even if the speaker was by now long dead.

She'd given Alex his point of warning, because he hadn't known better. That was as fair as could be. But then, once he did know, she'd held her decision to her chest until the very last second, just in case. And sure enough, he'd fucked up and burned both of them. And she still couldn't bring herself to entirely hate him, but nonetheless he could go fuck himself, and she wasn't sorry at all.

Better to know the truth than to throw her life after a lie.

The stones dug into Kimberly's sock-covered feet, a dozen points of pressure that sent an exhilarating ache through the soles and up past her ankles. The pebble path—or "foot massage trail"—was in the center of Victoria Park, and it was mostly frequented by elderly locals. The first time she'd come here, it had been with a group of other foreigners including Rich, and they'd laughed and dared each other to walk on it as his girlfriend took pictures and film. Kimberly was the only one to enjoy it, and since then she'd made time to stop here every time she was in the vicinity, alone.

The path was a short loop of concrete, in which were embedded smooth river stones, but oriented with their blunted points facing upwards, creating a row of ridges. Stepping upon the path distributed one's weight across a much smaller total surface area than walking on level ground, all the force going into the points of contact. There was surely some greater metaphysical theory of acupressure at play, but Kimberly didn't know anything about that, or believe it. There was an outer track to the path, too, where the stones lay horizontally and gave smooth sensations with no hint of even faint discomfort, but that did nothing for her.

It must have been even more amazing when this place was new, but now many of the stones were missing, having come loose or been chipped off over the years, so she had to walk a meandering zigzag to avoid gaps in coverage. Her friends—even some of the locals—said it hurt. It kind of did, but it was the most exquisite, pleasant, liberating pain Kimberly had ever felt. She would walk for twenty minutes or more each time, shoes dangling from her hands, and when she laced them back up and walked away it was with an unparalleled lightness in her step. Any ache from her constant walking on streets and in buildings faded, at least for a time.

It was worth braving the park's crowds, worth the periodic mosquitoes. The path was in the middle of everything, but isolated in its own way, by context and content. Everybody here left each other alone, enjoying the place and the moment in silence. Hedges rimmed the spot and huge trees hung overhead and the only buildings in easy sight were squat public bathrooms. The sound of cars barely permeated. It was easy to believe that this was a campground somewhere, instead of a small oasis in the core of one of the densest cities on earth.

Every time Kimberly came here, up to the very last day, she promised herself she'd return again. For all its magic and mystery, Hong Kong could be distilled to this one thing that displayed so few of the qualities for which it was known. But it didn't matter. This was peace and healing, and when she finally laced her shoes up to head for the airport, Kimberly cried, and realized she couldn't remember the last time that had happened.

"I think it's a warning about the dangers of unconscious living," Kimberly said. "The water metaphor is a play on going with the flow."

The club was mostly empty now—it had been half empty all along, yes, but now there were only a few people left who weren't affiliated with the performers in some fashion. Kimberly was hanging around with Rich, his girlfriend, and the members of the third (and best) of the four bands that had played their little sets. They were discussing and analyzing the Talking Heads song "Once In A Lifetime," which the band had covered roughly an hour ago, apparently without particularly understanding it.

The setup was pretty typical: a singer, guitarist, bassist, drummer, and keyboard player. Less typically, compared at least to the other three bands, the members were quite diverse. The lead singer was a white guy, from Portland, Oregon, and he'd moved here to put his MA in English Literature to use teaching English to the children of the wealthy. The guitarist, his girlfriend, was a Filipina, whose family had moved here when she was young; she was by far the most proficient musician of the ensemble and by far the least talkative. The drummer and the keyboardist were distant cousins, the former from the mainland and the latter third generation Hong Kong. The family resemblance was clear, and they had a shared, distinct look, pairing a clear level of chiseled gym-focused fitness displayed via tank tops with some of the nerdiest coke bottle glasses Kimberly had ever seen. The bassist was part white and part Chinese, and had the best stage presence; his instrument was hooked up to some sort of transmitter that let him hop off the stage and prowl through the crowd as he played, somehow staying focused solely on the music the whole time.

It was the singer and his girlfriend Kimberly was talking to, mostly, while Rich chatted up the bassist and the cousins, filming something for some web series he was working on, or maybe just his glorified blog again. This was the entire ostensible purpose for their excursion tonight.

"That's an interesting interpretation," said the singer—Jon—as he paused to take a sip of his beer. "I can see it, I think."

"It's a question and answer sort of thing," Kimberly elaborated. "He lists all these possibilities—these potential futures—and directly addresses them to the listener. He straight up poses the question: 'How did I get here?' And that's when the singing kicks in, with the answer: 'Letting the days go by.' The water, the—the desire to just let life go, to take the easy route and live without intent—it can carry you. And then one day you wake up, not even literally necessarily, and you realize that where you are, how you've gotten there, you let it fall out of your control. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad if it isn't you. And then all that's left is to throw your hands up and scream, 'What have I done?'"

"I always thought it was about consumerism," said the guitarist. "He lists all these things, a beautiful house, a big car, lists a wife like a possession too, you know."

"I don't think so," Kimberly said. "It's in... the quiet moments, sort of. 'Time isn't holding up, time isn't after us.' That's just the thing, if your life gets out of control, if it zips by, that's not time being out to get you. But it is how the world works, because time won't stop for you either."

"Mm," Jon said, "interesting."

It was hard to tell if he was being genuine or politely brushing her off, and how much if any embarrassment was at play. Kimberly hoped he was feeling at least a little bashful; with his education he really should've figured out what he was singing about before projecting it from a stage. The band had even performed under the name "The Walking Feet," though had admitted it was likely to change soon. Aside from the one cover, their set had been primarily punk rock.

"Excuse me," Rich called from off to the side, "could I maybe get you two for a quick bit?"

"Yeah, sure," Jon said, nodding and moving in that direction, tossing Kimberly an offhand, "Be right back."

She shrugged. The room was even emptier now, the other bands mostly packed up. It was not a large venue, more a mid-sized bar, really. It had an uncommonly high ceiling, deep wine red carpet with an alarming number of stains, and lighting too dim to discern the stains' character clearly.

The whole evening had an air of nostalgia about it. Kimberly was dressed in more black than she'd worn in recent memory, and she was made up with lipstick, mascara, and heavy eyeliner like it was 2007 again. She'd been trying to fit the scene, by Rich's request, and was surprised to find she wasn't so far off the mark. It felt like stepping back into an old costume, but was not terribly unpleasant.

"Excuse me." The voice caught her by surprise for a moment, though she was still near the others and shouldn't have expected anything like solitude. It was the bassist, smiling at her as he moved away from the others.

"I, um, I forgot your name," he admitted.

"Kimberly," Kimberly said. She returned the smile. He was the most handsome member of the band, even if you took the cousins' ironic glasses and Jon's unavailability out of the picture. "And I forgot yours too."

"Alex." He extended his hand and she shook it. Her vaguely positive impression strengthened when he neither crushed her fingers nor treated her like she was dainty and fragile. "Can I get you a drink while they take care of the promo shit?"

He waved vaguely at the rest of the band, clustered around Rich striking silly poses now as not-Shrek took pictures.

"Thanks but no thanks," Kimberly said. "I've got a one-drink limit and I had a beer an hour ago."

"Doesn't have to be alcohol," he said. "I can stand a thirty-dollar coke for a new fan."

She looked at him, narrowed her eyes a little, felt for any signs of danger or the sort of idiocy that'd piss her off and ruin what had otherwise been a nice evening.

"Alright," Kimberly said, detecting none. "Let's see how the bartender can make you regret your generous offer."

One of the expats Kimberly didn't know too well but had met on several occasions, a French girl in her early twenties who made her feel impossibly old despite only half a decade or so separating them, referred to the busy time in Mong Kok as "walking rush hour." It was as apt a descriptor as any. Most of the time, Kimberly tried not to get caught up in it, as it entailed a rather substantial curtailing of options; pedestrians were swept along with the flow of traffic pressed shoulder to shoulder, and changing directions or stopping was a process that required a high degree of assertiveness and a willingness to weather dirty looks. Fortunately, Kimberly had both of those qualities in spades.

Today, she'd simply lost track of time, and so found herself in the thick of it. Alex had some after-work function, and so she'd set out alone to explore the used CD bins in the basement of the Sino Center, a towering shopping center better known for its aboveground floors, which offered a staggering selection of merchandise for animated shows Kimberly had never heard of, and a smaller but less-than-hidden array of pornography. Down at the bottom, however, were a number of small shops that sold import music at reasonable prices, and which saw far less traffic than those establishments found higher up. Several people had by now told Kimberly that used goods were considered vaguely distasteful by the local culture, but nobody had quite been able to explain how or why. She'd picked up a box set of Bob Dylan's early albums in mono, for far less than she would've expected it to run.

The Sino Center was actually pretty friendly as far as small scale Hong Kong shopping centers went. It was cramped, with dozens of independent businesses each occupying their own small room, but the walkways between them were usually free of obstructions, the exits were clearly marked, and the lighting was decent. In other places, especially those that sold clothes, Kimberly had found herself ascending a narrow escalator without a downwards-facing counterpart anywhere in sight. At the top, she'd been thrown time and again into a claustrophobic funhouse maze of mirrored walls, overstocked booths, and heavy, stifling air, all with no clear method of egress. It was almost unbearable even if she lacked direct baggage with mirror halls. Generally, the only way she'd found to escape without setting off fire alarms was to climb the floors past most of the businesses, until some upper-level nook or cranny had an elevator with a fritzed-out "EXIT" sign hanging over it. It was little surprise that fire was an omnipresent specter in this district.

As she moved along with the masses, Kimberly was struck again by the sheer scale of the place. She'd looked it up, and this was at one time the district with the highest population density in the world. There was no free room, no privacy, and yet she felt absolutely anonymous. There was just too much happening, too many people, and nobody took any notice of her. She was rarely recognized in her daily life, even in the US, but here she was free of even the consideration that it might happen. As she passed by a small restaurant devoted to selling Irish-style French fries in favor of some fried mushrooms from a local booth next door with a name written only in Chinese characters, she was just one of the thousands. And when she stepped outside the flow of humanity to eat in a little alley, it was only as a person finding an improbable moment of isolation.

"Oh, oh-oh," Kimberly sang. She managed to keep the sarcasm out of it this time.

The band (currently unnamed) was recording, and Jon had come up with the idea to get Kimberly involved, once he found out she played music herself. They'd invited her to sing the female vocals on a cover of "Video Killed The Radio Star," because the guitarist (named Rea, Kimberly had learned) didn't like singing. After a few rounds of negotiations, a deal had been struck: they were recording the song twice, once in the traditional roles, and once with the parts switched. After all, Kimberly had explained, there weren't any references to gender in the song, and she wanted to do a little more than croon nonsense and repeat the title. After a round of obligatory Yoko Ono jokes, they'd set to work.

It was strange being a part of something both creative and collaborative. It was stranger still getting involved in a project with even vague commercial potential. The plan was to press a hundred or so copies of an EP and sell them at shows, and Kimberly had found herself, for the first time she could remember, able to relax her rigorous standards without beating herself up over ethical lapses.

The rules were simple: Kimberly refused to use her name and reputation for excessive personal gain. This meant that most of what she did, she did for free. It had been the case with her writings regarding her time on the island, with the editorials she sent newspapers and websites, with her infrequent public appearances. Sometimes a university or some other institution would ask her to come and speak, and she'd do her due diligence, and if she found the cause worthy and the request suitably free of cynical exploitation, she'd let them fly her to wherever, put her up for a week or so, and pay her just enough to put her back on the road to the next stop. Anything beyond that, she refused or gave away.

It wasn't some grand statement of charity, or any real benevolence. It was about principles and identity. If Kimberly cashed in on her reputation, her infamy, then she was no better than the many classmates of hers who whored out their suffering for money, renown, and political power. It was unfair and horrible that they'd had the chance to honestly pursue such things stripped from them, but that did not justify countering with the further (and perhaps greater) wrong of treating what they'd suffered as a resource or a gift.

And using a pseudonym, well, that just felt dishonest. It felt like she had something to hide.

But here, now, it didn't matter so much. Kimberly wouldn't see a cent of the proceeds. They had said they'd credit her somewhere in the liner notes, by her real name, and she was in some of the pictures they were considering using in the packaging. And yet, because of where she was and the time that had passed, it was as anonymous as it could be, and would remain that way until sometime months or years down the line, when she would probably be long gone from their lives, and only then would someone on Discogs put two and two together. If the band was still going, maybe the unsold copies could pay their rent. Maybe the attention would get them in with a better label. It was the sort of gift she felt comfortable giving, uncertain and delayed as it was.

Alex was cracking up across the room, bent almost double, fist to his mouth as he tried to stay inaudible. The studio was small, pretty amateur, still nicer than anything Kimberly had ever been in for musical purposes. It was owned by a friend of Jing, the keyboard player. This friend was allegedly going to serve as their producer as well, but Kimberly had yet to meet him. The room was full of gear she knew well and equipment she couldn't begin to understand.

"What?" she asked, giving a playful glare. The tapes were still rolling. That too was a strange experience, having her voice recorded. Even though it had never truly stopped—not with the guest spots and talk shows and the inevitable cameras at events—she still found it unsettling, just as she still slipped easily and instinctively into a more performative stance when it was going on.

Now Alex stopped trying to restrain himself and gave a full on laugh.

"It's," he said, "just, it's just... you. This 'ooh-ooh' bullshit, it's not you at all."

Kimberly smirked. It was maybe the best answer he could've given, the sort of answer that was why she'd spent the past two weeks crashing at his place.

"Well," she replied, glancing around the room, narrowed eyes meeting those of each of the members of the band in turn, "that's why Jon's singing it in the next take."

At first there was only one monkey.

She saw it at a distance, climbing on the railing of a bridge that crossed above the highway. Kimberly had seen monkeys before, but having them outside of cages, totally unrestrained so close to civilization, was still a new experience. When she pointed it out to Alex, he laughed.

"Just you wait," he said.

They finished the cup of snake soup they were sharing. It was a novelty, and one Kimberly had kind of mixed feelings about; the shop they'd purchased it from kept its snakes right there in cages, proof that the ingredients were fresh, and that lack of distance made it feel a little stranger than she was used to, but the soup was pretty good and actually did taste kind of like chicken. Once the cardboard cup had been disposed of, they moved down the path, and Kimberly saw just why Alex had been so sure that she hadn't seen anything yet.

The pedestrian section was actually a road, with gutters on each side covered with metal grates. It was carved into the side of a hill, with dense foliage up and down the slope, and a concrete retaining wall holding back the soil above. Monkeys perched on this wall, at first just one or two, peering from the bushes, but then more and more, ever more brazen in their presence. Monkeys sat in the trees, some singly, others clumped up in clusters. After three minutes of walking they were everywhere, dozens, hundreds of them, looking on from all sides.

The monkeys were fearless. They raced through the gutters, rattling the metal grates like passing trains. They strolled brazenly down the road next alongside Kimberly and Alex. A van was parked to one side, and a monkey hung from the rearview mirror. There were a few other people around, including a family with two young daughters. One of the monkeys charged at the littler girl, who shrieked. The monkey raced straight past her, into the vegetation on the other side.

"They're feral," Alex explained. "Used to be pets or something, then their population exploded. You can't carry plastic bags here, or they'll think you have food and attack you."

The most disconcerting part was not when the monkeys arched their backs and hissed, however. It wasn't when they got close. It was how casual and human-like they could be. They lounged on stumps, splayed out and unconcerned in poses that left them looking like teenagers worn out as the party started to wind down. They sauntered, full of confidence and bravado. When they scratched their heads, Kimberly could imagine doing the same.

And yet, some of these monkeys displayed hideous wounds. One had deep gashes in its side, strips of flesh hanging off, fur matted with blood. Another had been scalped, and the bloody bone of its skull was visible. It went about its business as if unaware.

Alex caught her gaze, did a double take as he realized what exactly they were looking at, and frowned.

"I don't know," he finally said. "I guess maybe animals experience pain differently. They... they fight amongst themselves, I think. For food, or mates, or territory, or just to survive."

And Kimberly nodded, barely aware as her fingers brushed across her shoulder.

There was nobody else on the top deck of the ferry, likely because of the faint drizzle. It was better this way. Kimberly valued time alone, especially when she was saying goodbye to a place.

Her suitcases were beside her on another seat, the sort of casual occupation of space that might've been incredibly rude if there were others around but was pragmatic in their absence. The boat rocked with the waves, but the motion didn't bother her. It never really had. Maybe it was that the first time she'd spent any notable duration at sea, she hadn't had a choice, and had bigger things to worry about besides. Maybe she was just innately adapted to resist seasickness.

The gloom and clouds wrapped the city as it fell away behind her. It was nicer than on a normal day, because it was natural, unlike the typical brown haze that hung over the sprawl. The air here had a taste, one that had struck her as soon as she stepped off the plane. She wondered how the next stop would lie on her tongue. Differently, surely. She was heading to Australia.

But that was still to come. For now, for these last few moments, it was just Kimberly and the ocean, the city behind her and the island ahead, a world of experiences and possibilities left behind and another stretching in front.

It was a choice, always a choice. Other people found their places and settled down, built lives and discovered stability and became the adults they'd always wanted to. Kimberly couldn't, wouldn't. Not now, maybe not ever.

It was always a choice, and for the moment she chose to let the water carry her ever onward.