Naked and stoned in the dark, that’s how.

But at a more immediate level, this isn’t your parents’ novel. (Duh, it’s in a blog.)
There are lots of episodes in this story, and more all the time, which is how blogs and serials work. But they aren’t linear, not like that was Monday, this is Tuesday, watch out for trouble on Thursday. If you read your RSS feed every week (highly recommended) you aren’t getting a chronological sequence. It all connects up, but you can connect it the way you like it.

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She hung, suspended in a state of no time, no space, no future or past. No more pain.

Rising and falling, a face looking sightless at the stars, surrounded by a sargasso of gold hair streaked with blood. Naked, mindless, a child of the currents and swells.

Then came the nip on her ankle.

Then the slickery slide around her legs, the caressing brush by her buttocks, the playful nudges in her stomach, then her groin.

Then the big, muscular body surging up from beneath her, forcing her dangling legs apart. The tensile fin raking across her crotch.

And her eyes opened again.

Slowly, she moved her arms forward, dragging through the resistance of the water, moving like sluggish bottom creatures, all soft and slow. She felt a slight touch at her knees, then the sleek torso rubbing up her abdomen, rubbing her breasts as she moved her arms around into a barely conscious hug. A hug she held for a long moment, clamping herself to that big, streamlined body. Then she was pulled underwater, a quick shallow dive that shocked her awake, brought her to the surface coughing and sputtering. She loosened her embrace and looked at the conical head riding the surface, nudging her throat, laughing at her. “Bruto!” she yelled. “You made it!”

There was not even the hint of her directing anything or calling any shots. After she had greeted the whole pod one by one–the males crowding playfully in, the females reticent, but sliding by to greet her, Mayab nuzzling her head as if concerned about her wound–they started moving away and she rolled prone in the dark water to attempt to move with them. She was stiff, weak, finless. Pinoccio, the big alpha, pressed up from below her, sliding under her stomach. She grabbed on, letting her hands slide back to the base of his flippers, extending her elbows until she lay on his back, head beside the dorsal fin. And he moved out in a powerful lunge, his flexing trunk moving beneath her chest. His pistoning flukes brushed her calves until she raised her legs to the surface, spread wide and trailing behind as he led the pod west.

She’d ridden Caruso and Bruto and Gitmo, lying in rapture on their backs. They’d come for her! She hugged them tight to her heart as fragments of the night came back to her, crashing into her head unbidden. Those fuckers had left her for dead! And God knows what they were doing to MeiMei. She’d killed some of them. Good. They’d left her dead in the water! But her true friends, her real lovers, had come for her. She shuddered on the undulating back, salt tears streaming down into the sea. They came and rescued her.

A hour later, she was laughing into the night, howling at the moon. The instep of her left foot was pressed against Pinoccio’s fin, the right foot on the throbbing back of Yaqui, standing erect with spread legs as they blasted her forward through the night like a water-skier. They’d done this dozens of times at Discovery, Curtsy’s looks and figure quickly vaulting her into the showpiece slot for riding on dolphin beaks. But this new pose worked better for long hauls and the beasts were practically frisking with the fun of romping her across the water like a moonlit golden goddess.

They passed a small boat, very low in the water, and the people seemed very excited as she blew past, waving. Later she waved to a fisherman, who damned near fell out of his boat. They were close to shore then, she could feel it. When she could see the dark shadow of land, strung with human lights like a diadem of sparks, she looked for landmarks. And finally made out the park at Tulum, the unmistakable ruins. When she saw the lacy white break line at the reef she jumped off the backs of Guido and Bruto, almost pulling off a flip before hitting the water.

They were all around her at once, whistling and nudging. She laughed and stroked them all, slapping the guys on their melons or shoulders. “This has been so great, guys. I wish I could just take off with you, hang out forever. Come back when I’ve got my fin, okay?”

Pinoccio bumped up under urgently, but she chuckled and disengaged.

“I can’t let you take me inside the reef there guys. There are already going to be fishing boats out and they just blast around at top speed inside there. And might even shoot you.” She waggled a scolding finger, “You keep biting fish out of their nets, you’re not making any friends.”

Finally, she swam towards the reef, which was close to the surface at this low tide, getting nudged and bumped and felt up the whole way. Once her feet brushed the reef, she knew they wouldn’t follow her any further. She could make it in from here easy. Get some clothes and food and… They Came For Her!

She paddled until she hit a gnarly head underwater, found footing on it and stood up, raising her out of the water from her nipples on up. She clapped her hands and saw a dozen beaks break water, looking at her. She felt like singing them a song. She blew kisses and waved, “Good bye, dudes. And you’re welcome for all the fish.”

She made it about halfway to shore, tiring and in a dicey state of mind as she did her lazy crawl. So the panga was on top of her as soon as she heard it.

She reacted too slow, diving as deep as she could, but not deep enough to avoid the bottom skeg on the outboard motor hitting her head and grooving the scalp right down to the bone, like a plow. For the second time in eight hours she drifted in the water like a corpse; tawny naked flotsam the waves hustled towards the beach south of Tulum.

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“Look up,” Tuan said. “Smile and wave.”

Which was the opposite of what MeiMei had been doing. But she lifted her head to look at the hovering helicopter, so close its downwash was ruffling the water on the off side of Tuan’s kayak. Gave them the beauty pageant smile and window-wiper wave she hadn’t used since she was Miss Academic in the Miss International District contest her sophomore year. The chopper bobbed in what might have been a return salutation, and moved down the coast, perhaps seeking more smiles, waves and cleavage shots from tourists frolicking in front of the big hotels.

“When you’re hiding, it seems like everybody is after you,” Tuan said. “So you end up acting like somebody they’re looking for.”

MeiMei continued to paddle in the oddly lilting rhythm she’d picked up and honed during the hours of skimming across the dark waters of the Bay. Interrupted by two repetitions of the turtle/dolphin gambit. With the coming of daylight, they’d hugged close to the hotel zone, blending in with the swimmers and players with other expensive water toys. MeiMei had so far exchanged waves with three jetskiers, two paddle boats, several other kayaks, and some weird thing that looked like a lunar lander tricycle with big fishing floats for wheels.

“You seem to have some experience in this whole fugitive thing,” she said to Tuan over her shoulder. “Is there a one-armed man in your life?”

“Just one more example of generalism,” he replied. “And of course I’ve been a fugitive from the laws of thermodynamics for years.”

“On the lam from the Entropy Cops?”

“As are we all. In the end they corner you when you’re too feeble or stupid and unlucky and these withered old people, or splattered stiffs take you in hand and lead you back to justice. Or at least homeostasis.”

MeiMei laughed. It was kind of fun carrying on conversations with a man she couldn’t see. With Tuan seated behind her, matching her waterbug paddle strokes like some sort of Chinese sync teamster, she didn’t have to maintain eye contact, didn’t have to make appropriate facial expressions, could just talk and listen to his fascinating line of gab. It’s like the internet, she thought: pure expression with no meat involved.

She glanced down to see if the sun was getting to her skin yet. They hadn’t exactly had time to apply emollients while fleeing the forces of justice, homeostasis and rape/murder/artifact theft. Not to worry, her arms already had some tan and she was catching some shade from the brim of the big ugly cloth hat Tuan had given her. The hat that could be twisted down into some mobius disk that sprang out into a hat because it had a wire sewed around the brim. Perfect topper for a generalist/inventor/geek. And her neck was protected by the bright yellow T-shirt stuffed under the hat, but draped around her shoulders. Covering her hair, was the main point there. At last, she had thought, I’m a sought-after blonde. Fortunately the arrangement of the T-shirt didn’t show it’s logo, A geek on a beach sporting a huge bulge in his trunks, a bevy of adoring mammaries, and the legend, “Girls Love A Guy With a BIG JOHNSON.”

It figured to be a long day, after a long night. She was starting to get lost, she felt: her life cut down to the chase.

“Tuan, will I have a life after this insane goose-chase?” She asked over her shoulder as he did a little something with his stroke to guide them around a gleaming Donzi anchored in front of the Ritz Carlton. It had no visible passengers but was rocking in a staccato rhythm that, taking into consideration various sound effects being emitred on board, suggested that somebody was getting shtupped in the scuppers.

“Did you have one before?”

More or less, she thought. Unless you consider “life” to include a circle of friends, sex within the last year or so, romantic moments, maybe even kids and dogs and that whole bit. But hey, that’s life. “Well, I had a career, anyway.”

“Been there, done that. I get so much more work done since I retired. But yeah, we’re going to get you out of this mess and back home.”

“But I’m washed up in the country I specialized in.”

“They say Cambodia is the new Mesoamerica. Architecturally speaking.”

“Oh, good. I’ll pick up some Khmer or whatever and head right over.”

“Look, you don’t know how this is going to play out. That guy could get shot by a narco cartel tomorrow. Or his yacht blow up. Or he gets caught on camera and extradited to a U.S. prison for something totally unrelated. It happens.”

She rather liked the exploding yacht angle. Bet Aphra could hook that up in a jiffy. Figure out a way to get that pilfered museum off first. For about the tenth time, she felt an almost sexual yen to catalog that collection. “And aren’t they overdue for another revolution or coup or something? But I guess it’s one of those ‘one step at a time’ things.”

“One stroke at a time, anyway. Exactly what I was going to suggest. The future looms less when you focus your awareness in the present. Look at this: we’re paddling along in wonderful limpid water, with a great view. Those teeming idiots over there are all paying big bucks to be here, fifty pesos an hour for kayaks. Wait until we get past the buildup, down into the biosphere reserve. It’s breath-takingly beautiful.”

“You’re right. And thanks. Be here now, right?”

“Once you start seeing time as relative, it’s a quick step over to it being illusory. Increasingly I’m starting to view the physical world in exactly the same terms I heard from this old Sufi master in Iran twenty years ago. The world is made out of attention.”

“What did he mean by ‘attention’?”

“Exactly what I asked him. And he said, ‘Attention means attention’.”

“Was he a drill sergeant? I guess that’s too deep for me. Or mystic or cryptic or deficit spanned or something.”

“Don’t make me show you the equations.”

“Any fate but that.”

“This whole thing started because you wanted to find out what’s beyond the end of the world, right?”

“World according to a stone calendar by a vanished civilization, anyway.”

“Okay, you look around and see the world. Close your eyes and you see a lot less. Get really focused and you see more, more detail revealed as you pay closer attention. Now you go to sleep. What happened to your world?”

“It stepped out for lunch with the light in the refrigerator. So this is one of those subjective/objective things?”

“That’s a distinction that’s been falling apart ever since Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”

“You sound pretty sure of that.”

“Absolutely certain.” He smiled happily, watching her flex and reflex in front of him, her flawless cocoa skin glistening slightly from the heat of the sun. Fun lam companion, he thought. And feeds me straight lines: I like that in a woman. “So what are you paying attention to while you’re asleep?”

“I don’t have dreams,” she said. Then quickly added, “I mean, I don’t remember them if I do.”

“So what’s the difference, then? Somebody watches a needle plotting a graph of your brain rhythms and clocks your eye movement and concludes you’re in there swinging aboard a pirate ship full of clowns and naked schoolteachers, but just don’t know it.”

“Yeah, I guess. I have trouble with the Deepak Chapra view of physics, but I can see it about time, I guess. We kind of made time up ourselves, didn’t we?”

“We didn’t make up days and years, but hours and minutes are completely artificial. But I guess I’m saying something like, let’s say you’re drifting down into sleep. Your view of material things is fading out, sounds are dropping off into silence, your speech ability is going to nothing, maybe you’re talking nonsense to yourself. Thoughts slowing and winking out. All your charts of the world are crashing down to the zero ordinate. Where’s the zero point, your end of time?”

She thought about that for awhile, then stopped thinking about it. She took his advice and drank in the scenery, the pleasure of the slick knifing motion of their boat, the calming rhythm of paddling; like a physical mantra moving forward by means of the rotary swing of paddles. Her arms pulling the paddle around the air/water like a geometric cone, an hourglass of movement with it’s center directly in front of her solar plexus. This is now, that’s then, she thought.

After about ten minutes Tuan spoke again. “Once we’re south of the airport we’ll put into a little mangrove hole I spotted once. Eat, get some sleep. I think we’ll take the next leg of this little jaunt by night.”

“Works for me,” she said. “Day, night, what the hell? Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

Tuan feigned a disapproving tsk. “Just row, row your boat.”

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Paco had thought summers were brutal back in Sinaloa. Ha. It got damn hot and soppy in Mazatlan and Culiacán, but nothing like over here on the Caribe. It was like being in a hot towel all day and most of the night. Shower off, the water’s lukewarm and you’re sweaty before you can dry off. He was getting really, really tired of always having his balls dripping with salt itch.

But sweltering here in Quintana Roo had two big advantages. He had a job. Which was not something to be lightly sought over on the Pacífico coast. Seasonal, undepaid, silly… but it was a job and occasionally attracted a few groupies.

And he could devote himself to The Game.

It’s funny but he had always thought of it as “The Game” even though everybody knew it was called ulama. But over here everybody just called it “the prehistoric ball game” or “the Mayan ballgame.” And even funnier, he hadn’t met a Mayan yet who actually played The Game. Or even knew how it was played. But that was the great part, really. In fact it was downright chidisimo because that meant when Xcaret–which he thought of as the Mayan-Gringo Disneylandia–wanted to stage games on their authentic phony ball court they had to import players from Sinaloa. So here he was. Digging it.

Another funny thing, Puch knew more about the history of the game than he did, and he was a star player in the top league in Sinaloa. They’d played at the carnival in Mazatlan, the second biggest in the world, for the Governor, for the U.S. and Canadian Ambassadors. And took home beer money. Or less. Here he was making a living and scoring with chicks from like Norway and Japan and Alaska and shit.

Puch said ulama de cadera, the style they played, was a direct descendant of the oldest ball game in history. How’s that for chingón? Centuries before anybody played baseball or futbol or basquet or, whatever, golf. And think about it, where else were they going to get a rubber ball? The only rubber in the world was here in the Yucatan. And playing The Game wasn’t just something to do on Sundays, have a few beers and go humiliate those nacos from the Guasave team: it had been like, a religion. Kings and warriors and priests. Sacrificing the losers. Or was it the winners? Anyway, it was a big deal.

And look where he was playing now. Well, during high season, anyway. A brand new court made to look like old stone, colored lights on the game, cute Mayan “cheerleaders” (actually those porristas were about as Mayan as he was… mostly kids who wanted to get on with foclorico troupes up in Guadalajara or the D.F.). Stars, they were. Fireworks and big applause and flashes going off. Get nice tips for posing with people. Sometimes some really nice tips from gringas and europeas. And everybody here was a major stud from back in old “Chinaloa”, too.

They hand-picked the best for this–after all, they paid the best. Xcaret didn’t assign teams, let them clump up on their own. So it was pretty much the top players from the Coast against the cream of the hillbillies. Mani had said it, and it was true: Xcaret was the SuperBowl of ulama. Right here in Mayalandia, where it all started, then died out.

Puch told him that wasn’t uncommon for this area. He said horses got started there, then went to Spain or somewhere and died out here. But the Spaniards brought them back. It was how things worked over here, is the way it looked. Like the Judios going back to Israel or something. And now Puch was building his own ballcourt, is how it looked.

It started out when Puch, who they knew because he led snorkle tours at Xel Ha and Xcaret and was a very solid guy, muy gente and buena onda, had invited a bunch of players over to this Crocun place to eat and suck up a few sixes of Superior. Tasted like dishwater compared to Sinaloa’s own Pacífico, but it was the local fave, La Rubia de Categoria. And they all came back. You would too, if you tasted Señora Pop’s chow. Riquisimo!

And they’d started playing down in this big pit behind the restaurant. It used to be a stone quarry, but had been scraped out and there was this pond at one end where some crocodiles and iguanas hung out, but the rest was this almost perfect box where they could run around, practice passing the ball from hip to hip, take shots at a basketball hoop Puch had mounted sideways on the wall of the quarry, instead of the traditional stone ring.

They taught Puch the game, and he wasn’t bad at it, either. And he taught them a lot more. He’d been off to la uni but mostly he just ran around learning stuff about his people and his country here. And they’d all tidied up the quarry a little. Puch conned some guy with AguaCan to bring a little mini-dozer in, but they did a lot of sort of moving rocks around, pounding the floor of the quarry flatter with big mauls. The way they’d cut the stone out, there were already tiers, and sometimes their wives and girlfriends and an occasional stray tourist chick would sit up there under this palapa Puch had set up, watch them play and toss them cold chevesnow and then.

There was something different about playing here. Not like Xcaret, which was more a spectacle than a sport, like those cape and mask bruisers in the Lucha Libre. And different from back home, where it was this community thing. Here is was straight-out deportiva, man on man, teamwork against teamwork. They loved playing down here and came over every Sunday, and a lot of times during the week, maybe just to help groom the court. It was actually starting to look like the real thing. And hey, wasn’t it the real thing? Weren’t they indigenous Mexicans, weren’t they true players?

Lately it had been more fun because a bunch of the dancers and musicians had started showing up as well. Not in the whole feathers and animal head drag like at Xcaret, just jeans and skirts and sometimes swimsuits. Nobody swam in the croc pond, though. Nice bunch of kids, mostly from like conservatories in Merida and Mexico, girls studying dance and playing Xcaret for the money, like us. Not a real Mayan in the crowd.

They’d been doing a little grooming of their own recently, making a sort of platform above the goal end of the ball court, trying out routines up there, dancing around a fire at night while the musicos jammed and we sat around and watched and clapped.

The weird thing was, you couldn’t have paid him to do stonework in this heat. Be a damn albañil getting the minimo for sweating like a negro. But they were doing it for fun. It just sort of felt like something they should do. And if they needed to get rid of a rock, there was always a place for it. And if we needed rocks, they could just pull them out of the slope of the hill. Puch sort of set aside areas to take rock and fill out of, one on each side of a sort of outcropping above the end of the cancha and dance platform. One day Mani was standing there bumping a ball up and down off his hip pads, but he pointed up the court, and said, “This place is starting to look like Palenque or something.”

And it did, like they were carving a Mayan site out of live rock. Paco mentioned this to Puch and he just smiled. Told him, “Stick around.”

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MeiMei’s face emerged from the water and she gulped air through her nose. Tuan’s hand was still tight over her mouth. She was in a close-feeling cavity, darker than the night itself. She felt Tuan take one of her hands and guide it to a hard, rounded grip. The kayak, she realized. He flipped it over and they were underneath it, inside it.

He spoke calm and low into her ear, “Don’t make any noise, okay? Hold on to that and start swimming straight ahead, pushing it.”

She nodded and he released her. She put both hands on the inverted cockpit rim and started doing a frog kick, pushing the boat along ahead of her. She felt it move faster as Tuan joined his propulsion to hers. In a voice barely loud enough to be heard, she said, “So they spotted us?”

“They were about to, I’d say. They’ll still see us, but I don’t think they’ll pay much attention.”

As he spoke, she saw the dark hull around them glow slightly, the black-painted fiberglass translucent to a powerful spotlight beam. Now that was scary. She almost laughed out loud at that. You’ve been stripped by goons, had a gun shoved down your throat, threatened with undersized rape, chased by water-bikers…and a light was scary? She realized what the light was revealing to the Marines or mafia or whoever was out there: a sleek black shape with dorsal fin, moving forward at about the right speed. She wished they could dive.

“Is that why you put that fin on top?”

“On the bottom, actually. No, it’s an ongoing experiment in hydrodynamics. Find the right size and shape to stabilize your course without interfering with turning. It just happened to end up looking like Flipper. Or a shark fin, I suppose. I hope not.”

Why did that matter, MeiMei wondered. Then it hit her. You’re a bored sailor or cop cruising at night on a wild goose chase, holding a machine gun… and you spot a shark. What do you do?

“Well, actually,” Tuan went on, sensing her tension, “Not ‘just happened to’. The shapes of the natural world obey and utilize the same physical logic as the ones we engineer. Resemblances are hardly co-incidences.”

But MeiMei was still a little hung up on the idea that people might still be trying to gun her down.

“Jesus, they really are looking all over for us. For me, anyway.”

“Go with ‘us’. If they catch you, I’m just going to become an inconvenient bystander. Disposable.”

“Are you serious?”

“Are we swimming in dark seas trying to avoid capture by armed men or did I get it all wrong?”

“And they might just shoot us up anyway. Any second.”

“In the midst of life…”

“This would be a pretty weird place to die.”

“Most people worry more about the time factor.”

“I’m site-oriented. A professional deformity.”

“Well, time’s all relative, anyway.”

And not to change the subject, Tuan thought, but let’s do. “We’re not in the spotlight anymore. I’m going to duck out and take a look-see. Don’t wander off.”

“I’ll be in the forward stateroom. Please send up some tea.”

“Okay, but no entertaining in your room.”

Then he was gone. She could feel the sudden absence of his breath, of the air space his head had occupied. She kept stroking along. I’m the motor of a fake dolphin, she thought. You know who would love this? A quick pang of hurt and memory flashed over her. Damn! Dead in the water. Well, let’s just hope he doesn’t go two for two.

Then Tuan was back. entering the little space silently. “They’ve moved off, but are still too close for us to get righted. We’ll just keep dog-paddling away for awhile. We’ve got all night.”

She kicked along for a few minutes, leaning her head against the underside of the deck while scissoring her legs. Got all night. Great. Then what? She said, “What you said about time being relative? How can that be? I mean in real-world terms?”

Tuan chuckled, glad to see her distracted from their current perils. “You know what Einstein said about a minute on a hot stove seeming like an hour?”

“Did he mention padding underwater while waiting to get shot up?”

“Actually his example was an hour seeming like a minute was kissing a pretty girl.”

She let that hang for a minute. Was she catching this guy’s eye? Well, hardly the time and place for that. Relatively or not. “But how can that be? Time is… well, it’s what the world is organized on.”

“In archaeology textbooks, yes. All those little charts and time lines and dating and all. But not in physics texts, no.”

“But…” she thought about it for a few seconds. Hmm. “But what else is the world structured on?”

“Well, you’ve got your matter, of course. Most people would sort of pick that as what things are built of.”

“And it’s relative, too, right?”

“Both factors of the speed of light. Which is also relative.”

“The Mayans were obsessed with time.”

“So they carved it into stone, right? Tried to nail it down and own it. Can’t be done. I mean in, you know, universal terms.”

“By nailing down matter.”

“The human impulse. Every molecule on earth with its own deed and legal title. Monsanto has patents on biochemicals that occur naturally in the soil.”

She nodded, unseen in the total darkness under the turtled hull. After a minute, Tuan heard her giggle.

“Lots of people find that Monsanto thing funny. I’ve thought about building a stand-up routine around it.”

“No, I was just thinking. We look like a dolphin moving along here. What if some male dolphin sees us and decides to mate with us?”

Tuan laughed softly, glad to see her mood lightening. “So is getting mated by dolphins a big concern for you?” He realized instantly it had been a faux pas.

“Not as much as some people I know,” MeiMei said glumly. “Knew, I guess.”

“The Dolphin Discovery girl?”

“Yeah. Curtsy. And I guess that’s how everybody will think of her. If they ever do. Perfect tombstone epitaph: ‘Dolphin Discovery Girl’.”

But she won’t have a tombstone, will she, MeiMei thought. What was it she said, herself? “If you screw up, you’re crab chow,” wasn’t it? She couldn’t think of that beautiful, lively body sloshed limp across the seabed, nibbled by animals. And reduced to bone, then to calcium dust, she reflected. Pressed down by more of it, becoming part of the limestone slab of the Yucatan. Maybe that was better than being dropped down in a box.

Her silence resounded in the close dark of the inverted hull, and Tuan could guess its source. He hoped he could lift her out of that. Hell, he hoped he could keep her from getting killed in some gruesome way by the remnants of Mexico’s “Perfect Dictatorship.”

He counted off a hundred frog kicks before saying, “You’ve had a really rough time. And it’s going to stay rough for awhile. We’ll be able to turn upright and start paddling pretty soon. And once we make the shore, we’ll blend in to the vacationers along the Kukulkan strip. The further south we get, the easier it’ll be. Once we’re in Belize, you’ll be safe and things are really beautiful. It’s going to get better. Okay?”

“Then what? Can I come back to Mexico? Ever? My work is here. How will I get out of Belize without any money or a passport.”

“I brought a lot of money. Which gets accepted as a passport in a lot of places. Belize has airports and borders with other countries. But don’t worry about that. For now just take it day to day. Hour to hour until daylight, actually.”

Just take it as it comes, she thought. Paddling through paradise with this guy. Not the worst fate in the world. “Thanks, Tuan. Thanks for everything.”

“I told you. You’re my fantasy come true. Thank me once we get out of this in one piece.”

I think that can be arranged, MeiMei thought. She continued to kick steadily, each time she spread her legs wide, then thrust them back together giving her a subtle reminder that Tuan was right behind her. One kick at a time, MeiMei.

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