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afraid.
    When I finally awake from a dreamless
post-flight nap, I find that I have no idea where I am or what I’m
doing or why I feel so sick with misgivings and regret that I came
home. Reverse culture shock, maybe. One of our co-teachers warned
me about the phenomenon, and told me that the first time he
returned to England after having lived in Jinan for a year, his
sudden ability at the airport to read the billboards and posters
and understand everything the people around him were saying
sent him into a panic, and he spent his entire first week back home
hiding out in his old bedroom, terrified of everything familiar and
absolutely certain that if he went outside, he would die and so
would everyone else.
    The room I’m in now is dark and Tara sleeps
soundly next to me. She feels lifeless when I touch her and so I do
not touch her anymore. Instead, I take in my surroundings. There
are stuffed animals piled up around a baby rocking chair in one
corner of the room. A jubilant, soft-looking yellow frog takes me
in good-naturedly from behind two cute koalas and a monkey. There
is a Cold War Kids poster to my left, and a corkboard full of
photographs next to a small desk littered with old bills and
Hallmark cards with inspirational Frost and Angelou quotes etched
across pictures of promising roads and living forests. Outside of
this room, I can hear a minor susurrus of squeaky laughter,
Miranda’s suicide-inducing conversation, and the jabbering of
someone on Hogan Knows Best . I sigh, realizing I must be in
Tara’s house on Flint Street.
    Since we left, Tara’s once-rich parents have
managed to pay Tara’s third of the rent so that Tara’s roommates
Julie and Miranda could keep the house and Tara and I would have a
place to return to should Suzhou not work out as planned. I was
already losing my apartment back in August when we signed our
contracts with Soochow University, and everything I own is now
packed away into a small storage room on the far north side of town
or crammed into the trunk of my Honda Accord parked in Tara’s back
yard.
    Through the blinds and dusty lace curtains
come thin floating lines of color from the traffic light outside. I
spend some minutes depersonalizing myself, wishing I was the
traffic light out there. I can see its changing red, green, and
occasionally yellow glow draped across the bare white wall by the
window. For one brief moment, as I lie in Tara’s bed and catch
tinted glimpses of random friends’ faces on the corkboard whenever
cars pass in the half-night, I want nothing more than to be just
another traffic light standing sentinel to the approaching
evening.
    I stare at Tara’s naked back while rubbing at
the dried film left on my penis from the sex earlier today. The
tattoo on her shoulder, which is of a ferocious oriental dragon
coiled around a serene fairy, troubles me, and I go back to staring
at the green and yellow and red that paints the wall the color of
dusk.
     
    When we left the airport today, Tara and
Hajime and I had an early, frantically conversational lunch at a
Jewish sandwich shop near Church Street in Orlando. I went outside
three times to smoke a cigarette, but it kept getting drops of rain
on it and burning out. Hajime asked us lots of questions, about
China, about the Chinese, about teaching and money and how the food
was and our collective stomach flu experiences while living abroad.
Tara asked him lots of questions back, about Hajime’s sister
Mitsuko and her now-husband Mark Conet, about Jasmine’s new
boyfriend Michael, about drug experiences and the weather and how
the art and surveillance cameras were going.
    “Why aren’t you talking, bro?” Hajime asked
me as he finished his club sandwich. “Is it that post-travel
anxiety thing?”
    “Kind of,” I said. “Sorry.”
    Not much time passed before Hajime and Tara
launched into their usual mealtime political debates. Tara pointed
out that at least with the attacks on September 11,