Dragon Lady

27 March, 2004—Yangon, Myanmar—

She has been unofficially christened the Dragon Lady, this whorishly haughty Chinese dame who presides over the Queen’s Park Hotel with her sharpened eyebrows. I am convinced that behind each closed door in each hallway she has established a uniquely sordid story at negotiable rates, a lonely Conradian Kurtz here, an opium-addled biographer of Rimbaud there, all far more anonymous than such name-dropping implies. My room with the corner window full of crow is quite pleasant, I have no complaints—but B’s window opens onto a concrete wall scarred with open-ended plumbing, dozens of pipes splashing waste-water down into an enclosed courtyard strewn with drenched trash. He has decided we will be moving, once he has located one of the finer government-owned hotels that we were, as superficially enlightened travelers, dutifully trying to avoid. The Dragon Lady can, her eyebrows assure us, help us with that.

When we emerge from the front door of the hotel this morning, we find that the power lines strung from pole to pole are densely packed with legions of roosting pigeons, so many that the air is perfumed with a certain stench. It’s an ordinary morning for the local folk, people are on their way to work, and many of them stop to give an old woman a few coins in return for a small brown paper bag full of breadcrumbs. These they throw casually into the air—immediately, great stinking clouds-of-pigeon descend upon them greedily, their collective wings shattering the low rays of morning sun until every surface in the world is aflicker with the interruptive light of a primitive motion picture. The pigeons, moments later, have re-settled on wires that sag under their weight, and the daylight of the world is stable once more. It occurs to me that the old crumb-selling woman might have her own closed door at the hotel as well, paid for with her daily collection of coins. The Dragon Lady must have seen to that.

Two hours later, having followed her directions, we are en-cushioned in a cookie-cutter-clean-five-star-hotel at a cheap-motel-nightly-rate. B can hardly contain himself when he learns of the ‘five-o’clock happy hour’ with ‘first drink on the house’. I am so exhausted that I drop off to sleep not long after that free drink, in prudent preparation for our flight to Mandalay early the next morning. In the middle of the night, I awake in—. Well, I awake in—. Oh, hell—. I may as well just say it with as much brazen simplicity as possible—. In the middle of the night, I awake in a five-star-hotel pool of my own shit. It’s a side-effect of the medication I have begun taking, it still wreaks periodic havoc with my digestion, sometimes the churn of my bowels wakes me up in the middle of the night. But not on this night, on this night I am so knocked-out from travel that I simply shit myself without even opening my eyes, and then apparently roll around in it for an hour or two. For most of the rest of the night I am frantically washing out the sheets and pillowcases in the bathtub, then stringing them up around the room to dry. I nap just before dawn, lying on my back with a towel diapered tightly round my mid-section. By the time the knock comes on my door, a signal that the car to the airport is waiting, I have already reassembled the bed, hiding the damp spoiled sheets beneath artfully rumpled blankets. With my suitcase in one hand and my untold story in the other, with my eyes red and burning and my numbed head pounding, I open the door and inquire with a faint croak if there is time for a quick cup of tea. All my unspeakable stench of embarrassment I lay at the feet of that laundress of all emergencies, great and small—the Dragon Lady, whose linen closets on the other side of town are no doubt stacked with such salvaged sheets, shit-stained, even bloodstained. “I can take care of that,” she assures me with the distant half-smile of minor deity, and pockets her small profit.