Free This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen Page A

wine from his tray. The wine had a chalky, cheap taste. He sensed this was some sort of art event. He spotted a bar in one corner of the room, where a white-jacketed bartender was mixing cocktails. “Can I go get a drink?”
    â€œOf course,” Camille said. “You are the guest of honor.”
    He examined her ironic, narrowed eyes. “Thank you. Can I get you something?” He left her there and wandered toward the bar. The hall was warm in the autumn air and many of the women had bare shoulders, slender carvings of smooth skin rising toward their black hair. He could discern now that some of the people were younger, less wealthy looking but often with earrings or creatively colored hair. He supposed they were the artists, nonconformists in a country that had only lately adopted the Western tradition of admiring the rebel.
    He reached the bar and ordered two gin and tonics, then leaned his elbow on the white cloth and looked through the crowd. Necktie knots glided past, shoulder straps, a gold earring, the smell of nicotine, crisscrossed bits of Chinese conversation. He’d lost sight of Camille. She wasn’t standing where he’d left her. A little shudder of fear went through him. Would she bring him all the way to the center of this dark garden just to ditch him?
    His eyes came to rest on a giant photograph, easily ten feet long, mounted on the wall behind him. The cardboard placard beside it held some Chinese characters and the words “Buried City #46: Hero in the Island of Forgetting.” Next to that was another placard in both Chinese and English, telling about the artist, Xu Ruoshi. It seemed the artist came from one of the cities that was flooded by the Three Gorges Dam and had dedicated himself to photographing his city in its death throes. In this picture, that city had already been almost completely abandoned, but a few old people still refused to leave, and little signs of life appeared among the empty buildings. Laundry on a line. A tiny dumpling stand with one steaming pot. The artist had colored the photos in washes of blue-green, so even though the city had not yet been flooded, it seemed to be underwater already. It was beautiful, and Harrington found himself lost in it, imagining that its life continued to go on magically at the bottom of the dammed-up river. He could be that dumpling vendor, standing there before the abandoned movie theater. The show would be over, the people gone, and him left standing there remembering a crowd that would never return. Harrington stared for a long time thinking of the man, his tiny home, his son far away from him in a distant city, beyond his help. He felt a deep sadness. The Ecstasy …
    Two drinks sat fizzing on the bar and he lifted one to his cheek, could hear the radio-static sound of the carbonation. He felt the sour bubbles bursting through the sweetness on his tongue. A woman’s sudden laugh, a tray of rice noodles stuffed with shrimp, a flat note from the saxophone, a shawl draped across a shoulder. Far down, in the drowned city, laundry was hanging on a line.
    â€œDo you like it?”
    Camille was next to him again.
    â€œIt’s very moving.”
    She pointed across the crowd toward a thin young man with long hair wearing a black suit cut so strangely that it seemed almost like a caricature of a suit. “That’s Xu Ruoshi,” she said. “He is the artist. He just won a very important prize, and this party is to honor him. If you like, one day I can take you to the gallery where his works are on display.”
    The prospect of having her as his guide again made little sparklers start to sizzle softly in his brain. “I’d like that.”
    Suddenly another woman appeared beside them. She seemed around forty, alluring as a spider in her tight black dress and feather-covered vest. Her hair was braided stylishly against her head like an African. She could be someone in the background of an