Visibility had truly deteriorated. Ander had bought two liters of water from a convenience store, drank all of it in one continuous chug. He then looked around thinking his personal condition may have had an effect on his perception of a thick-fogged world, but he still couldn't see further than ten meters, and soon he recalled the smog that had been forecast. No taxis passed by, barely any cars either; most of the sensible residents of Shanghai, Ander sighed to himself, had probably heeded the warnings of this apocalyptic pollution event and stayed indoors.
There were, however, the wonders of GPS and international data allowances. Ander set a course for Shaanxi Road and began limping towards it like a zombie in a hat with a gadget.
Indeed, he thought he had finally summoned the courage to dispose of his Panama hat, the cursed thing, his crown of bourgeois recklessness, the one he had paid three-hundred dollars too much for (if he wanted a simple souvenir, he should have stuck with the five-buck-flea-market one). He could remember thinking to himself as he threw it across the floor earlier that night in some dark place away from him, good riddance; thank God and Buddha and to some extent Zhou En Lai for permitting wine because such an act needed to be done in a state of semi-rationality. The alternative would be Ander spending forever trying to sell it on a second-hand exchange for what he considered a fair price, but what the world knew was obscene. Alas the latter, less dramatic reality looked more likely to play out. He supposed that during one of his black-out periods he must have gathered it up in shame and prudence, or someone could have picked it up for him and returned it.
Above Ander glowed, through the haze, the blue of the empty expressways, a hue familiar from a week before, then seen clearly from the roof of that bar, slicing the city like a laser. How it smeared this night. How shameful it was that yet again Ander had committed more all to easily avoidable errors.
The dinner at Spring and Autumn's apartment had sent Ander into a profound anxiety, to new defeatist lows. He explained this to Spring as they surfaced somewhere on the western side of Shanghai's center, and Spring, feeling terrible for making Ander feel terrible â even if it wasn't really his fault â decided he would take Ander to the best hetero-flexible bar in Asia. The translation proved challenging, but in short it promised fun for all tastes. They served excellent and well priced sparkling wine, according to Spring, who went on to offer the first bottle on him. Ander felt somewhat guilty (considering Spring had already paid for the gallery entrance fees and probably some portion of the food, also knowing what Spring likely earned as a leaflet distributor), but he hesitantly accepted.