Out of the ground emerges a big fucking egg, whose all-seeing eyes stare ferociously in the four living directions. Long lines of prayer flags bow in the storm wind, the sky darkening to a purple bruise. Rain soon. Pilgrims circle clockwise, spinning the ornate metal prayer wheels, some mindfully, some distracted, many in red Tibetan robes, fingering mala beads, holding children, chatting on mobile phones, begging.

Like clock hands made of people, the rough living morass turns. Some westerners have that I-don’t-believe-in-anything-but-I-will-go-with-the-flow look, or the I-am-actually-a-deadly-serious-religious-guy look, or are just shopping at the perimeter shops (that’s me, I bought a mala). There is too the kindness of hands laid across a child’s head, the heartfelt namaste, soaked in rain, the open face of believers, thunder. To rediscover the joyful energy of children! The Tibetans twinkle, often smiling & laughing. This is on a very old path out of Tibet. They’ve passed here for centuries, founding many monasteries nearby.

I need this place today. Last night I couldn’t sleep. My muscles are heavy, recovering from sickness. Despite my pissiness & ingratitude & shame, Luck finds me sipping masala tea, beside a flickering candle. Beyond all sense, She wants to forgive me, urgently, responding Yes to all my No’s. How can I let my sadness go, I ask Her, in this rain? How can I just be wet?

The sky grey & powerful, raining steadily, sparked every few moments by branches of light, like bones of an x-ray, & atrocious thunder. In overpowering incense, a Nepali covered in dirt is drunk & wrestling an invisible bear. A motorcycle whizzes by on the red bricks, honking. Tiina is ecstatic, eyes big. We join the lovely circling parade & are soaked. The hour when light changes every minute, every second. I have been suckled & schooled on irony, so why do I like to see people worship so much? Just as the torrent begins, we reach the Double Dorjee restaurant & duck into the candlelight for momos & thukpa soup.

& for your strangely vigorous health, on the night streets of Kathmandu, the city-village where electricity functions for just half the day, & in the Thamel district there is no light after dusk but candles & white-as-death fluorescence from solar generators choppy as dying helicopters & the streets carry you through half-visible chaos of shops & rickshaws as if inside a warm ocean current, so many stars & this bright moon delicate as a bird bone igniting the awesome Himalayas & one spectral brown face speaking Hello friend where you from you like smoke hash? & apartments decrepit & ugly in daylight are now iconic, nightmarish, windows candlelit out-of-sync like a run-down stage set, a motorbike behind you shrieks & its headlight casts an image of you against the wall, a long shadow three stories tall, not recognizably you, the cries of boys laughing & a twang of badminton rackets beside a fire of plastic bags & bottles & grass & garbage, one brown dog in the post-dry-season pulverized dirt watching the low flame with dark eyes, with the wisdom of a small sinless demon, as if it were about to say All gestures made without heart will be revealed & soon, & in the oily dark birds great in number dart before a woman on a balcony who rubs a white towel across her face, in brick-coloured air, ochred air, wild as candlelight flickering in the smoke of cloves & incense, & world-weary men sit in a tiny shop under one dusty bulb like a dying ember, & boys sit in a silent circle, & one man who might be asleep sits cross-legged in the gloom, as if he were Eros himself settled on the soil, & you too sit knee-to-knee before the god who now holds the head of the city itself upright for you to examine its throat, the pulse on either side of the windpipe throbbing gently, & a cold white light emanates from just behind your head like an invitation into the familiar swirling dream where you walk the dark stairs, up or down is not clear, light of a cigarette sucked on by a shadowy face lighting the whole Kathmandu Valley, & the lord of death clown in blackface among, who won’t stop smiling over his frown.

This is how you say Do Not Touch in the Forbidden City, the Vatican City-like imperial township in the centre of Beijing, where the Chinese emperors of the Yuan, Ming, & Qing Dynasties roosted for almost 700 years. In the movie “The Last Emperor,” the child runs through its Imperial Palace. Now it’s a museum, swarming with the denizens who were once shut out of its royal walls. Framed by the rhetoric of the state, the archaic sites inside—“Supreme Harmony Hall” & “Heavenly Purity Gate,” like dioramas behind glass, untouched for epochs—are quaint curios of the past, leading up to the glorious triumphs of the revolution. “Cultural relics are irretrievable, please be causeful when viewing them,” says a sign.

At its main Tiananmen Gate hangs a banner with the glacial visage of Mao Tsetung. (I open up my shiny new copy of Mao’s red book & read, Everything reactionary is the same; if you don’t hit it, it won’t fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.) Across the street, Tiananmen Square is the biggest & ugliest piazza on earth. It strangulates. So much walking space, but all made of oppressive brutalist concrete. The opposite of freedom: raw power. Architecturally, it’s a kind of cult classic in the tradition of “Casablanca,” piecing together archetypal clichés from a slew of cultures: an Egyptian-style obelisk (“Monument to the People’s Heroes”), Russian-style statues of communist proles (in front of Mao’s huge mausoleum), Corinthian columns, & sixteen giant red flags à la the Nuremberg rallies. The result is Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

People are the same everywhere, no? We try to be kind. We try to be brave. We are fragile. A single act of carelessness ruins us. But politicos & their bureaucrats are also (usually) the same everywhere. We begin to believe in Big Ideas. We are offered compensation for compromise. We learn to sleep beside our own inhumanity. The Beijing Patriotic Health Campaign Committee suggests—blithely, ubiquitously—that we Do Not Smoke, although we have all of us witnessed, at the margins of the Chinese capital, the far-flung waste produced by the state & its nuclear smokestacks.

On the streets, military is pandemic. Boys in oversized green stormtrooper coats, waists like ballerinas, stand at attention in doorways, on pedestals, under flags. Around them, on the streets of the bright lovely Xuan Wu district, kids with Green Day hair wave Maoist red flags for digital pics while holding up two fingers sideways like Ali G. A man with an irretrievable expression drifts past clicking together two walnuts in his left palm. Electric scooters & bicycles wind among the people in constellations of silence.

Acrid smoke, pork tang in smog, burnt soy sauce, sulfur, grilled chicken stinging the eyes, dust. Red lanterns behind a grey gauzy lens, rice paper windows. Temple roofs curved to ward off the evil of straight lines. O’erhanging eaves, red tiles, roof charms. A high-pitched scream, eternal loss. Dogs in doorways, dumplings. Loud spitting. In the stones, imperial dragons. A bronze lion. Crouching tiger with a bright pearl in its mouth. In the walking tunnel under Tiananmen Square, a man low on his knees, left hand missing. Bowing so slowly, up & down. Causeful.

lightheaded; throbbing; serpentine; child after a tantrum; roadkill, just alive, a raccoon, that sound; touch of the scythe on the back of the neck; the songs of every tongue, especially those delirious & cruel; the Dalai Lama as a boy, his eyes & purple scarf; chestnut smoke; a god from Caravaggio, there will never be silver in his hair; my grandma’s perfume (Charlie); a plane falling toward a mountain; a father who will not hurry through the airport, though the plane is leaving; the scent of every being who is having sex on this earth; if there will be another day it will not tell; the unspeakably beautiful girl who locks eyes with you but will not speak when spoken to; the first touch of vodka on the tongue, & what the tongue does, bitter willingness; the face of the old Japanese man sitting cross-legged over the Foro Romano at night; a lover’s voice on the phone or first thing in the morning, which you admit though you can’t place yet who it is; flush in the cheeks of an unmarried aunt; a greeneyed boy at a party, reading Celan in French at the window; a train passes in arrant dark or a dog dripping with blood nears the fire or a genius epileptic with blood around the mouth opens his coat & you say “Anything”; a little girl walks still sleeping out of her room down the stairs & circles her house over & over in a slow line with seven wolves; when I woke it was not from this particular dream, & the pathway back to it was not clear …

From the hindquarters of the goat that kneels in the cold shade a black liquid sac slips onto the shit & dirt where the goat licks it & it drains like bile like anger to reveal itself as a dim squirming thing with tiny bright white hooves & bleating. Still being licked it crawls off gimping on its four broken bird’s legs uphill from the wet steaming spot as if from shame while from the fur above another black sac drops.

A long wide snowy valley ringed by mountains sharp & low, like the great open jaws of a dead god. Inga is our imperturbable guide/cook & Tascar is our driver, steering the Range Rover though the snowdrifts & endless swirling non-roads with loose precision. We stay overnight with a nomadic goatherd family whose lovely ger (yurt) glows at sundown like a little white circus tent. The mother & father wear the traditional long robes (deel) & golden sashes (bus). Their toddler girl chases down newborn sheep & goats & hauls them around with round-faced glee.

Cold springtime! Severed goat hooves in the dirt. Vertebrae & horns & all variety of animal bits are scattered about among discarded Sprite bottles & new-age waste. A few cows & horses lie frozen & arched, half-covered by duvets of snow.

Days blend. On the road there’s nobody for hours. Now & then a hawk seated beside the road. We veer around two monks sitting cross-legged on the asphalt. A man speeds past in the snow on a low-powered motorcycle, fur gloves fixed to the handlebars, in his deel & bus & ornate hat as if he’d just buzzed out of the 12th century. On the Ogii Lake, ragged snowdrifts like the bleached & smashed mandibles of goats. Ice fishermen in the distance. Blue Buddhist ribbons wrapped around frigid trees. The ice creaks wetly, bleerk, bleerk, blaark. I am worn out. My knee is twisted & swollen. I lost my favorite ring.

Inside a ger, women feed the stove with dung. On a solar-powered black & white TV, the famous Mongolian sumo wrestler Asashōryū Akinori—ancient, unsmiling, like a late Marlon Brando—has returned from Japan & holds forth to reporters in an eloquent whisper. We are spectres under the oculus, in smoky blue-grey dusk. Inga, after speaking to her boyfriend who’s in Korea, sits by herself in the starry dark in her fur hat, singing softly. All night the goats cry like baby humans.

Hills of frozen animals along the road attest to the coldest winter in fifty years. On the vast grey plains, under mountains that will never unthaw, a cow wearing a leather blanket grazes beside the corpses of her dead ancestors. Starlings crisscross like whims. Ravens, mock-khaans of this bright inferno, prance atop a pile of horses trussed in a motionless gallop, as if straining to haul themselves out of this white sea of death.

Four & a half days on the great pea-green viper (No. 004, Chinese: Yingwoche, sixteen cars long, Moscow to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, thus far) is just long enough to forget there’s any destination at all. My Finnish friend Tiina & I find ourselves in a tourist carriage jammed with northern Europeans with rucksacks full of vodka & drinking games & songs & Nordic good cheer. The Chinese major-domo sips tea. He shells sunflower seeds, brushing his black hair at his little windowside table.

The Chinese major-domo will not smile but presides over our dreams with grace, shelling dreams, a retainer of the underworld, on this single endless passageway. Our Kafka, our Dalì, our Murakami. He transcribes my rêve, the one about breathing underwater, into his log. He scowls over the sink, elbow-deep in pig viscera.

In daytime the dream brightens, but veiled. We pull out of the turquoise Omsk station, pass its broken-legged grain elevators, its old women sweeping snow with their armfuls of sticks. Countless towns of great fuel tanks like the discarded coffee cups of gods. Dmitri, lonesome & hammered, smashes the small table with his fist & roars “это нормально!” soaking one of the Dutch girls with gherkin juice. The tall birch trees of Kirov reach for heaven but give up part way. We do not have enough blood to stain this snow, not all of it.

It’s a mistake to think of the train on a single track, or that we are moving through time, or that we are moving at all. We’re so still it’s unbearable. Thus the fantasy of such fluid movement, in which we take childlike joy, like birthing or breathing that rocks us to sleep & permits us to enter our dreams as through a door left ajar by the Chinese major-domo. It’s a mistake to think the train exists in space. It provides us with the blur-line of snow because that is all we can comprehend. If you hear a baby crying or a chicken skreighing behind a door, ignore them, ignore all the cubbyholes of lovers, card-players, shadowy readers, whispering quarrelers, the way you might ignore one of your own chaotic or murderous thoughts.

Suddenly a frozen river, the scroll unfolds, eternity, still as ever. But we shake, the samovar drips, the moon rises over the tall hats of Krasnoyarsk. And, as everywhere, technology is mankind’s imbecil. Men huddle before an oil tank, before a lime-green power shack. Electrical poles, our mute witnesses, arms broken, die in the snow. In Novosibirsk, tinny speakers bleat the ontology of discipline.

The rusted stairs of Tyumen! Potato piroshki five roubles. Lumber, lumber, lumber. Shaving is hard, water freezing. Snow collects between cars. Houses yellow as the constant toilet urine. The snowy roofs of Angarsk! The green fences of Ilanskaya! The train thinks for us, works for us, like a prophet, & we do not thank it or even notice. We who are separate, scared, tired, lonely, clean. Too clean. The train asks us, How did you get this clean? Our melancholy, we say. Our delight. Boo-huh, it breathes, boo-huh, boo-huh . . .

Imagining there is a train is a misconception. Yet on Day Three you have always been inside it & it breathes, drifts away from a sunset bleak as if the man you loved had vanished around a corner, or had never existed. They are rolling bones in the next cabin, you can feel it, the sky yellow, almost-white, going blue. Pink. Grey. Purple. When the stars appear colour drains. Snow falls like nothingness, leaving houses grey & shrunken, infinite cobalt blue. The referent vanishes & all you believed to be true is true, & near.

I understand nothing about Moscow, almost. At a latenight cafe, smoking Hamlet cigars & sipping coffee, lit by a plasma screen TV, I wonder at what age my fingers stopped shaking. This woman in high white boots with dark powerful eyes, & the aggressive man on her arm,  with his shades & long sideburns, do not care what I do or do not understand.

I inquire of a statue (resembling Orson Welles, grey against a grey sky, leaning back in an armchair, bored by the busy intersection) where I might find comrade Mayakovski. He climbs down & eyes me, in my cheap black furry souvenir hat with red star, & says, “You were taught that the worth of a thing is in its utility, so you drank the blood of the skies & are unhappy.” “The skies?” I ask. “Seven skies, he says, & this is the least of them.” “Cпасибо—” I stammer but he interrupts, “You are the luckiest man alive,” climbing back up to his perch: “Do not surrender your shadow.”

His bronze finger leads, sure enough, to Mayakovski, bald & surly, skating backwards, wiggling his ass to ragtime music at an ice rink on Red Square, in full sight of Vladimir I. Lenin who is dreaming that Pain & Pleasure are cousins kissing in a Starbucks window, their joy so fragile, Love under Capitalism. Mayakovski skids to a halt, dramatically, spraying me with ice shards. I laugh & admit, “I thought a couple of fold-up tables were the Burghers of Calais.” “I know what you mean,” he says. “I never outgrew my love for turning over logs to see the bugs underneath.” “Nostrovia!” I shriek, raising my hat to him.

The snow falls, light as crystallized vodka, on the tourists of this world & the other.