Yinchwan

— Think of the nights he must have prayed at his kitchen shrine for the success of his marvelous vision and invention—and now here he is tooling along through the streets of maybe Yinchwan with bikes everywhere, elegant, metal goddamned bikes with rubber tires and complex sprockets and chains, and all the people laughing at what a funny thing he’s riding on. People laughing to beat the hinges off of hell because he’s riding something those Yinchwanians wouldn’t even go so far as to call a bicycle . . .