2015: Resurrection

[Sweder]

Death-cab for Sweder

Jesus Christ. 
He was the ghost of Ayrton Senna, a fearless man with God on his side. My cab driver, the lunatic who transported me from the Shanghai Expo Intercontinental to Pudong airport. A journey of some ninety minutes and change covered in less than half that. In rush hour. It’s the closest I’ve come to death in my fifty-three years on the planet.

6:45 am and there's no time for coffee. Rumour has it the journey to the airport any time after 7 is a lottery, best get on the road if I’m to make my flight to CDG and connection to Prague, home of SP’s Last Hurrah. 

My driver is on a mission. 
‘Nee how’. He holds up a finger. 
‘Nee how. Yes please, Terminal 1’
I slam into the back seat, pinned there for the next twenty-five terrifying minutes as we launch into the City. Every light is green, every road-sweeper and cyclist missed by millimetres. Looming concrete flashes by under slate-grey skies. Sweeping curves and glass facades, colossal, rising out of an ocean of filthy low-rise barracks, shiny-bright against a backdrop of red-grey high-rise desolation. Farewell, my old China.

Traffic thickens like cooling porridge as the rush-hour takes effect. Ayrton tuts angrily as he flicks the wheel left and right, ducking here, diving there, changing lanes like a pro on the rain-slicked freeway. But the safety car is out, flashing lights on the horizon warn of trouble ahead. In a scene straight out of Gone In Sixty Seconds my man lunges across three lanes, heading for an impossibly close exit. We must be doing sixty. A silver people-carrier sits, resolute, in Ayrton’s lane. All I can see is the tiny yellow water barrel at the intersection. That won’t slow us down much, I think, as my heart swells like a courting Bullfrog.

Before I can go into shock the brakes slam on and we power-slide behind the people-carrier, straight in front of a monstrous truck. Horns blare, Ayrton curses. I can’t breathe. I catch my driver’s wild grin in the mirror. We are going to die.

Around us manic street racers streak towards the horizon. Behold, the rat race. Most, doing at least seventy, are on the phone, eyes fixed, mouths agape as they scream into their handsets. 800 million people, racing on high octane. 800 million and not one unemployed, all on a crazy-arsed conveyor-belt to the future. Eat, fuck, procreate, die, swarming like cockroaches over the scorched Earth. Westerners come to feast on the carcass, slurping greedily on the fatty scraps. They too will be consumed, their bones ground for concrete, vacant skulls paving the new airport road. 

A black sedan sweeps past, freshly-fallen cherry blossom plastered across its tinted rear windows. Shining pink in the greyest of all worlds, they remind me of the girl's red coat in Schindler’s List, a tiny rage against the death of colour, delicacy in the heart of a relentless machine. As the dust clears I'm reminded of another movie, the prescient and rather wonderful Interstellar, where mankind fights desperately to escape the dust-blight destroying the last remaining crops. We have been warned.

The landscape falls away as the cab finally slows, high-rise yielding to the flat of the land. My fingers release their 45-minute grip on the tattered vynil seat and I manage to exhale fully. The Great Lie cradles the airport; manicured lawns, tended flower beds, neatly-trimmed trees. Too late, dear hosts, I’ve breathed your foul, corrupted air for over a week. I’m out of here.