She must have a face that says it's okay to wake her up three in the morning--the dead of the night neither here nor there. The first time it happened, it had been a barely friendquintance. The call came piercing through the silence of Saturday at 4AM. He sounded incredibly solemn for someone who had been drunk and threw his keys in the snow. She'd been his second choice and last resort because she could speak Chinese and direct the taxi driver to her address. Still her place wasn't easy to find, and through the fog of her mind she'd been tempted to just turn off the phone and close the world off the way you'd pull down the blinds. The second time it'd happened, the guilt from the friendloverquintance climbed from his cell phone deep into her throat. She could hear her groggy voice reverberate against his shame-tinted tones. It'd been 3AM on a Tuesday morning, the morning before an important casting. She wanted to kill but she had no heart to do it. Instead she took out the knife that was insomnia and let its silver gleam in the dark until he's fast asleep and she's swallowing sleeping pills.
The third time it'd happened, she was just plain fucking mad at friendloverquintemisises. He cursed like an Irish sailor, whispers of "beautiful cunt," "men as shadow," "blue eyes" and lovely sinister things that made her blood run cold. When he held her like a raft adrift in the sea, all she could do was listen in fear and come to the profound conclusion that it's always the sane, slick, wise ones who are the hopeless, the cray, the devastated.
She thinks about New York all of a sudden. In the dead of Beijing night, she thinks: "New York, Did I really use to sleep safe in your womb?"