Everything here is aging. Nothing is aging gracefully. The apartment buildings are giants wearing faded and wrinkled pastel colors, Soviet relics displaced to the wrong part of the world. Their skin cracks and the pieces fall to the ground, missile duds playing Russian roulette with pedestrians below. Public offices are covered in kitchen gray tiles, stained with the rusty sediment of acid rain. Holes left by fallen tiles are missing teeth in their ugly smiles. The apartment buildings loiter between the alleyways below.

Weaving idly between the fat giants’ feet, junk collectors (shou polanr de ren) cruise through the neighborhoods with their three-wheeled carts and their megaphones, cajoling the old buildings to express their putrid excesses with the promise of a few crumpled rectangles of paper. Their voices echo off the peeling walls, repeating the same monotonous chants every morning, noon, and night, as if to hypnotize the giants and lull them back to sleep, lest they become irritated and stamp them out of existence—“Paying high prices for—old fridges—A/C units—washing machines—…” The echoes remind me an empty stadium, or perhaps a laogai camp.

The junk collectors come by, without fail, every single day. Their persistence is impressive. Only during the occasional rain do they take a break. I wonder, how long have they been doing this work? At their age, why aren't they enjoying their retirement? Perhaps college expenses for their children studying in larger cities motivate them to make an extra buck. Those of lesser means with the misfortune of having male children must provide them with a house and car so they can get married and carry on the family name. Alas, the odds are against them. The gender imbalance is significant.

Now that summer is here, handymen and popsicle salesmen have joined the junk parade. It's clear who makes the most money: the popsicle salesmen use computer-generated announcements and air-conditioned vans. Despite their larger coffers, their advertisements are unadorned by luxuries such as music. The computerized voices are disjointed, the intonation unnatural. But salesmanship is not a matter of creativity or skill—who needs frills or charm? I have ice cream. If you want it, give me money and you can have some.

Watching these parades go by, old men in their tank tops sit on the steps outside their first-floor apartments. They take in the cool morning air, chatting with neighbors. Every now and then, one indignant old man bickers at another. By the time the sound reaches me, it’s covered in the mud of reverb and echo from its pinball path. I can't make out what the problem is, but the issue must be a passionate one.

Another man has tied a hammock between two trees in the little courtyard between the buildings. He snores. He looks terribly comfortable.

The sun is setting now.

A few years back, these old men and women had a prefabricated pleasure dome—er, structure—erected in the middle of the little courtyard. This was an upgrade to the previous ad hoc one made of plywood scraps. This new structure, with its installation-mostly-finished glass windows and corrugated panel roofing, was the junkyard Cadillac of pleasure domes. It’s not much used at the moment now that it’s summer, but boy, was it bustling in the winter. Now that it’s summer, the gambling has moved outside, to the stone tables under the peach and pine trees. The wind blows soft and cool in the evenings, collecting their exuberant voices as it passes by.

I don’t know long I’ll be here. But, the air’s a sort of tranquilizer. It’s easy to lose track of time. It’s speeding up, and at the same time slowing down. Spinning in circles. I’m running through syrup. I’m in the belly of one of those giants, and I’m looking out. Maybe one of these days, I’ll stow away on one of the junk collectors’ carts. I remember other places, places with a pulse. Real places, not surreal ones. I’ll get there.