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The sidewalks were cracked, uneven, and so filthy that they looked
almost as dark as the asphalt of the street. The city filth was caked into
the cracks so that the squares that protruded awkwardly among the others had
mounds of dirt sloping from their sides to bridge the distance. During the
day the filth should have been more visible, but it was usually covered with
hundreds of feet, scuffling around each other by the displays of fruits and
vegetables. At night, however, the filth only made the sidewalk blacker and
the nocturnal emptiness of Chinatown more ominous.
She walked sometimes briskly and sometimes slowly and ponderously,
her footsteps making unnatural sounds that she occasionally noticed. There
was a smell of rotting food in some places and trash bins lining the
sidewalks. Flattened cardboard boxes were strewn around the trash bins and
slipping over the curbs onto the street. The new moon shone its darkness over
the city and what dim streetlights there were only added an eerie glow to
the quiet of 3 a.m.
She was in such a state that when she cast her eyes down to the
sidewalk and kept them there, she could see that the sidewalk was jumping up
towards her face with each step she took, but when she looked up at the
buildings around her, she felt as though she was floating by them
effortlessly, and she forgot her steps. Sometimes she would look at a
building or bus shelter and realize that she was slowly drifting towards it.
It was at these times when she would realize how drunk she really was. After
this she would think that maybe she should be afraid to be walking alone
at three in the morning in dimly lit, deserted streets, but her state did not
permit any real sense of worry to enter her mind, and she would soon find
herself thinking of other things.
It was at one of these such moments that the sidewalk gave in
beneath her feet. She had stepped on one of those strange, metal trap doors
which usually lead to mysterious underground storerooms. But when she came to
her sense which told her she had senses that she better use quickly, she saw
that she had landed in a gigantic bin of very small strips of paper. She
looked around the room and saw that it was full of other such bins with
similar strips of paper, some were visibly different colors or textures, and
others looked the same as the strips she had fallen into. There was a dark
tunnel that led out of the room, and she saw a small light moving through it
towards her. As the light came closer, she saw that it was a kerosene lamp
being carried by a man. He looked like he was about 60 years old and he
was very small. He was Asian, and his hair was partly black with little white
patches, and it had become very thin. He was wearing plain black pants and a
plain black coat and on his feet were little plain black slippers. He looked
at her sprawled in the bin of paper strips and as his eyebrows raised in
surprise, making his forehead burst into tiny lines of wrinkles. Then he
smiled and a million more wrinkles on his face were put to use, making him
look as many years older.
"Sody, the dooh, it is bloken," he said in an Asian accent
that was hard for her to understand through her already clouded mind.
"Oh, it's okay," she answered, and immediately wondered
why her first words to this strange man had been lying ones.
There was a short silence before he said, "Come een, come
een," in a sort of grandfatherly way.
At first she thought she would refuse him, but then she remembered
that since she had just fallen ten feet through a trap door in the sidewalk,
there weren't a lot of other options for her. Besides this obvious problem,
she had become very curious about the strips of paper, the dark tunnel, and
of course the strange old man who was still holding his little kerosene
lamp and now motioning for her to follow him into the tunnel. She had to duck
to enter the tunnel and she realized that, in her heels she was at least a
foot taller than him. They turned a sharp bend in the tunnel and it began to
slope downwards. The slope was very gradual at first but as it got steeper
she suddenly panicked. He was not taking her out to the street level
again. He was taking her deeper and deeper into the underground tunnels of
Chinatown. She had heard about these tunnels where there were cock fights,
drug dealing, prostitution, sex-trafficking, and maybe even slick Asian men
with stone faces and machine guns gambling and waiting for women like her to
fall through the trapdoor upstairs. She was scared, but if she ran she
would trip over her heels, and even when she reached the other room she would
have no way to get out of the trap door. He wouldn't have left the door open
anyways, although she had no idea how he would have closed it. She continued
walking with him.
She was trying to keep her head from hitting the ceiling when
suddenly they emerged from the darkness into another room. It seemed to be
inside the partially skeletal frame of a very old building, though she could
not see what was beyond the frame. There was a table in the room with a large
typewriter on it and a few chairs. There was a lamp hooked to the side of the
table that cast a stingy amount of light around the room. The man motioned
for her to sit down in one of the chairs and then disappeared between the
posts of the building's frame. He returned holding a glass with a
strange-looking liquid in it. The liquid was clear, but it seemed to be
sparkling. She assumed that it had bubbles in it, although she could not
distinguish any. He smiled again and handed the glass to her.
"Dlink, dlink!" he said.
She looked at the glass suspiciously and thought about date rape
drugs. But when she looked at the old man's face and saw his eyes waiting for
her to drink in a way that seemed not lecherous but simply hospitable, she
tried a small sip. The drink was the most disgusting thing that she had ever
tasted, but she forced herself to swallow it and smile at him. As she
swallowed it, she could feel the liquid moving down her throat, and it felt
warm. She thought that it must be alcohol, but the warmth seemed somehow
different. She took another sip and this time the taste did not bother her so
much. It warmed her down into her stomach. After her third sip she could not
help but smile, and she felt a surge of what seemed like happiness. By the
time she had finished the glass she felt calm and complacent. In fact, she
couldn't remember when she last felt so very happy, and she realized that she
had not been happy in a long time. The old man was still standing there
smiling at her.
"You rike it?" he asked.
"Yes," she responded, "very much. What is this
place?"
"Oh," he said, "this fotchun cookie
undahground."
She looked at him absentmindedly thinking of the strips of paper in
the other room. "Do you make fortune cookies here?"
"Mmm, no," he said and then looked as though he were
searching for the right thing to say. "We make…happiness," he
finished.
"Oh." She thought about this. A few minutes ago she would
have thought that the man was not familiar enough with the English language
to express what he actually meant and that happiness was not the word he
would have chosen in his own language. After the drink he had given her,
however, she thought that maybe there was something more to it. "How do
you make this, uh, happiness?"
"Aaaahh," he said and his eyes became suddenly mysterious
and a little light shone through them. "That is seclet."
She nodded and looked around the room again. It, too, seemed
mysterious and she could not see where he had gone to get her drink. She
couldn't see into the darkness behind any of the posts and the lamp seemed to
cast only enough light to cover the space between the posts.
"Theh is a way fol you to know," he interrupted her
thoughts. "I need you' hehrp." She was puzzled by this and he could
tell. He began wringing his hands and gesturing with them as he said,
"My Engrish, not good, but happiness should be engrish too." He
paused and saw that she was still confused. "I need you lite engrish
fotchuns fol happiness cookies."
She pointed at the typewriter and looked at him. He nodded
enthusiastically. She thought about it. She did want to know more about the
fortune cookie underground and the drink that he had given her. She wanted to
understand the secrets of happiness that the old man understood. He was
looking at her with an almost childish eagerness. "Okay," she said.
"I'll do it."
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