Free Swamp Foetus by Poppy Z. Brite Page A

and if you should happen to arrive after dropping a nice hit or two of acid, all the spiky Chinese characters will jump off the signs and race round and round at a giddy speed, laughing into your mystified, unslanted, unblack eyes.
    We stopped in front of a restaurant and considered having Dim Sum, but the menu was written in Chinese, all up-and-down. “Fried lice,” Robert translated, putting his sticky fingers all over the window glass. “Monkey brains in syrup. Eyeball pie.” He giggled. I noticed a crust of old lipstick in the corners of his mouth. Why had I brought him? Could I drag him into the shadowy serene interior of some temple, leave him sacrificed before a smiling golden Buddha?
    A river of people flowed around us as we stood waiting for something to happen on the corner of two inscrutably marked streets. Most of them wore neat black clothes and neat black slippers, and were a full head shorter than Robert or I. The darker of the two streets was lit mostly with blue neon—the blue light is a universal advertisement for Chinese food, and a native far from home knows that where he sees it he will find the rice lovingly steamed, the pork pickle well-braised— and the glossily bobbing heads flickered with highlights of unearthly blue. I felt immense, pale, bloated. Robert was worse. He shifted from foot to pink-shod foot, muttering under his breath, twirling a matted lock of hair round his finger. His eyes had taken on the color of the night sky over Chinatown. One look into them and I knew tonight would be a hideous adventure that might never end. He had that wild empty glare he got sometimes, like his soul had gone out to party and left him behind and he was determined to catch up with it. Once when he had gotten that glare in New Orleans, we woke up three days later in a motel room that reeked of ash and sour vomit, wearing nothing but dirty underwear and beaded Mardi Gras masks.
    But right now he only wanted ice cream. We huddled in a sweet shop, eating vanilla because the other flavors— lychee, almond, green tea—sounded too Chinese. Even the vanilla had a peculiar aftertaste, faintly oily but too delicate to offend. Beside us was a display case full of strange dusty-looking pastries: thousand-year-old eggs in sugared nests, squid jellies piped full of cream. The shop was lit by a single weak lamp behind a paper shade. In its dimness I made out only one other customer, a lone old man nursing a cup of tea.
    Robert wanted to drink, but had spent our last money on the bus fare and the ice cream. We sat at the table trying to think of a way around our poverty, or straight through it if need be. “We could find some girls,” I said.
    The very ends of his hair trembled. “Chinese girls? I heard that their, you know, their, you know...” His voice was loud and babyish.
    I lowered my own voice almost to a whisper, hoping he would copy me. “Cunts, Robert.”
    “...That they open sideways instead of up-and- down."
    Most of Robert’s babble slipped past me, but not this. I stopped eating my ice cream and became lost in trying to visualize such an intriguing possibility. In my mind I could see the tantalizing orifice, but it remained mad deningly vertical; I could not make it turn sideways. Only when Robert poked me in the ribs did I notice the old Chinese man standing silently before our table.
    He might have been three hundred years old. He might have been a Biblical king come out of the desert, with cold stars gleaming in his long black eyes. He might have been a bonsai tree, shrunken and gnarled, with skin the color of old wood. But he was well-dressed, I saw: a neat and sober black suit, a shirt so white it took on a faint silver glow in the dim light. A little beard grew under his chin like a goat’s, waggling when he spoke. “If I may disturb you?” He paused, then added, “Gentlemen?”
    Robert was beyond speech; he just stared, his mouth open a little, a last trace of vanilla on his lips. The