The Last Lover

1. JOE AND HIS BOOKS

Joe, the manager of the Rose Clothing Company’s sales department, clamps a briefcase under his arm as he passes through the narrow streets that lead to his office. He is a small, conservative man between middle and old age, meticulous in his dress, with shoes invariably spotless, his beard and hair regularly trimmed. His pale green eyes sometimes have a blank expression, either because he’s absentminded or because he’s eccentric. He often harbors thoughts of madness. Joe has a mania for reading, and for years he’s read one book after another, muddling all the stories in his mind. His memory is of the kind that’s excellent at making choices — a grafting memory — so the pathway of his thought is always clear. He usually sits in his office in City B with a novel hidden under the files, trying to look as if he’s hard at work. In fact, he’s reading all kinds of stories. As he is circumspect and conservative, his clients over the years have never discovered this secret. Joe’s manner of reading allows him to practice a singularly coherent method of linking his thoughts together. Every day his job interrupts him countless times, but in the space of a second he can get back into the flow of a story.

Joe’s home is on a small hill two streets from the office. From the windows a stretch of blue sea is visible, over which seagulls hover. In the light of an early dawn, he was already on the road to work. The people of Country A rise very late, and there was no one on the quiet street except a black woman, a street cleaner. Joe heard his footsteps on the empty street sounding a hesitant note. To the right, the storefront windows reflected his tidy hair and necktie. Joe turned away shyly and lowered his eyes to the ground when he caught sight of this distinct image of himself.

“Good morning!” he said.

“Good morning! You’re out early.” The slender woman leaned on her broom and observed him as he slipped by and disappeared little by little into the distance. Her large eyes blinked, as if she were lost deep in thought.

Joe reached his office, turned on the lights, and went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, then sat at his desk and continued with the story from yesterday. The book in front of him was very old, and its pages were yellowed; it must have been twenty years ago that he’d bought it. Joe had been purchasing books for three decades, and the house on the seafront was stuffed with them. He had taken all the beds and converted them into empty “chests” that sat on the floor loaded with books. Since the previous year Joe had been envisioning a magnificent plan: to reread all the novels and stories he’d ever read in his life, so that the stories would be connected together. That way, he could simply pick up any book and move without interruption from one story to another. And he himself would be drawn into it, until the outer world wouldn’t be able to disturb him. Joe had put this plan into action, and after two months of persistence it was already producing results. For example, he could even talk business with a customer (he is, after all, the manager of the clothing company’s sales department) and at the same time remain immersed in his stories. He would sometimes stealthily turn aside with a faint smile.

“Joe, my company would collapse without you,” Joe’s boss said when they met. He was the company’s owner, a thin man of about sixty with white hair and wrinkles like canals across his face. “How do you know the secret of getting our customers to like you?” As he spoke he almost sounded sentimental, but at the same time he stealthily sized up Joe’s reaction.

“I think it has something to do with my reading.” Joe spoke slowly, deliberately weighing his words.

“Reading!” The wrinkles between his boss’s eyebrows folded into an upside-down V.

“Yes, I read a lot of stories.” Joe’s speech quickened as a red flush spread over his face. “I, uh. . I’ve even been thinking of resigning so I can read books all the time. Really. I’ve been thinking it over.”

“Well, that would be a real loss for my company. You haven’t made up your mind yet?”

It didn’t seem as if his employer were urging Joe to stay; actually, he seemed hopeful that Joe meant what he said.

“No, not yet. I still have my wife and a child to support.”

His boss peered into his face for a moment, shook his head slightly as though a little disappointed, and motioned with his hand for Joe to leave. Joe departed, pondering what his boss might mean by what he’d said, turning this over and over in his mind until his thoughts led to a dark tunnel. This man, whom he’d worked with for many years, clearly understood his employee. But as to how deep this understanding went, and what he thought of Joe’s approach to life, and what hopes he had for him, Joe couldn’t tell from his expression or speech. His behavior was equivocal and vague, in distinct contrast to the precise operation of his denim manufacturing company. Joe had the impression that his employer concerned himself very little with the company’s day-to-day affairs, although he was interested in his employees’ attitudes and the degree of their loyalty to the company. Joe wondered why his boss didn’t seem to expect him to continue working there permanently. This was an insult to Joe’s self-regard, especially since he was very conscientious about his work and had an intuitive knack for the proper arrangement of things. Joe himself had great respect for this capability. At this point in his thinking, Joe recalled his boss’s wife. She was vivacious and clever, a gaudy woman of middle age. He thought this woman, Lisa, wasn’t a good match for him, yet his boss treated her with constant affection. Joe thought of his own home, his plain and capable housewife, and their likable son, who was off at boarding school. By comparison, he could understand the harmonious relationship between the company’s owner and his wife. But what did his boss think of him? What sort of expectations did he have for him? Joe was at a loss. There were occasional moments when Joe thought he might even tell his boss about how he read novels on the sly during office hours, but every time the words were on his lips he swallowed them back. Joe was a cautious man, circumspect to the point of being a touch pedantic. Once during a gathering at a restaurant his boss had gotten drunk and said, pointing at Joe’s nose, “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to!” Joe had turned white, thinking his life was about to undergo a great change. In fact, nothing happened, and his life went on as before.

After Joe left the owner’s office and returned to his own, he felt a floating sensation pervade his body. He opened a book and followed its heroine through the alleyways of a slum. But today the small alleys didn’t lead off in every direction. In one sunlit alley a fearful dark shadow appeared up ahead, with the pa pa flapping sound of a cloth fluttering in the wind, even though there was no sign of the wind blowing. Joe stopped in his tracks, frightened. At that very moment a telephone rang, and his secretary said a customer from the south was here to see him.

This man, named Reagan, had a square face and a stern expression. He wanted to sign a long-term contract with Joe. Joe figured that he would want to haggle as usual, and rapidly ran through a number of scenarios in his mind. But Reagan didn’t open his mouth. Moving a chair over to the window, he gazed down at the people clumped together in twos and threes. He propped his very broad chin on his left hand as if he were calculating, but also as if he were thinking about something that had nothing to do with business matters. Joe was perplexed, and thought again of the alleyway in his book. When Reagan started talking, Joe jumped with fright because his voice was raised in a near scream.

“In the south, there are rubber tree groves and coconut palms everywhere. How much clothing do you think the workers need to wear? Haven’t you ever thought of that? Do you have that much imagination? Yesterday two workers drowned in the bay because the clothes you make are too thick and heavy, and it’s hard to get them off quickly. . What kind of idiot designed these clothes? One of the workers who drowned was a girl. There were people who saw her leap out of the water like a fish and then sink back in. You fool!”

He held his head in both hands, looking unbearably vexed.

Joe was silent and reluctant to speak. He didn’t know what he could say to make this better. He’d known Mr. Reagan for many years. He was an educated and highly cultivated farm owner — or, rather, he didn’t come across as a farmer at all. He seemed more like the owner of an antiquarian bookstore. But today he displayed a violent temper.

“Do you really want to keep doing business with us?” Reagan looked contemptuously at Joe.

“We could design some light outerwear, pieces that can be taken off easily,” Joe answered mechanically.

“I don’t appreciate your way of thinking at all.”

Joe was at a complete loss after Reagan tossed off this icy statement. When Reagan had visited his office in the past, a scent of the open country, of canola flowers, had emanated from him. Joe would inhale this odor keenly, and involuntarily he’d drawn the deeply tanned southerner into the network of his stories. He had never sensed that Reagan felt any hostility toward him, but today he knew that he did. Joe drew his arms in as if he felt a chill, and Reagan noticed the movement immediately. He asked whether Joe was tired of doing business with him. If so, they could break off the discussion.

“Like the two of us. .” Reagan let out half a sentence and then swallowed it back.

Joe thought that he was trying to say that between two men like them it was difficult to reach an agreement. What was going on today? They had worked together for years; his figure often appeared in Joe’s stories, with that square jaw reflected in the mirrors along the road, swaying back and forth. . on the pathways in Joe’s mind there were always mirrors hung on the tree trunks along every side. Not long ago, Reagan had given Joe a pair of wild birds, and their dazzling, variegated plumage had sent Joe into fantastical reveries. Then he had gazed at Reagan’s expressionless face and felt that the man must be a conjurer with capabilities beyond anyone’s expectations.

Reagan walked up and down Joe’s office several times before asking Joe to hand him the contract. Then he signed several pages at lightning speed, so quickly that Joe couldn’t see clearly what he was doing. His memory retained only an image of protruding blue veins and the long thin right hand. In his mind he marveled: How could a farm owner have a hand like that?

Reagan left after he’d finished signing the contract. As Joe showed him out, he caught sight of his boss’s figure disappearing into the elevator. What was he doing on this side of the large building? Joe asked his secretary, Jenny, whether the boss had stopped by. Jenny stared at him for a moment and then slowly shook her head, disapproving of his neuroticism.

Joe had worked in this building for over a decade, and he was as familiar as anyone could be with his job and with the business of the company. Within his department, it would be almost impossible for anything out of the ordinary to happen without his knowledge. But today he realized that some things were getting out of hand. These things must have taken place outside of his awareness, and not even by racking his brains could he grasp the clues to what was happening.

That day, as Joe was on his way home from work, someone came up quickly behind him. It was the boss’s wife.

“Vincent drinks heavily every day now. He made a spectacle of himself on the lawn right in front of our house.” Lisa turned red in the face and she spoke a little bashfully. “He’s not young anymore. I’ve been wondering what sort of influence all of you have on him. Hmm?” The woman swung around and glared at Joe. Sparks unlike anything he’d ever seen before flew from her eyes.

Joe could not answer. He couldn’t even recognize the red-haired woman standing in front of him. The generally cheerful, gaudy Lisa was now shoving past him in a fit of rage, almost forcing him off the sidewalk. Like a gust of wind she was suddenly at a distance, her high heels energetically tapping the sidewalk. There were many people on the street at nightfall, all looking with surprise at the completely discomfited man. Joe saw an abyss open in the sidewalk ahead of him, and he walked toward it, thinking perhaps it would lead him into the web of the story he had recently constructed. But that large black open mouth wasn’t an abyss after all — it was an underground pedestrian crossing. And just as he reached the entrance to the underground walkway, Lisa rushed out from the shadows.

“Vincent’s mad! He’s crazy! Damn it, how could this have happened!”

The expression in her eyes was frantic. A strong hand grasped Joe’s arm and shook it, and Joe caught the smell of liquor on her breath.

“Hey, Lisa. Try to explain more slowly.” Joe spat out these few words with difficulty. A fury — at what, he couldn’t place — sprang up in his gut, and he felt disgusted with the small-framed woman.

But Lisa disappeared just as abruptly as she’d appeared. Thinking over the day’s strange occurrences, Joe felt his head buzzing with confusion.

Joe’s wife, Maria, was at her loom weaving a tapestry. It was her favorite pastime, and also a means of supplementing the household income. Almost all the homes in the neighborhood had samples of her handiwork hanging in them. Today Maria was weaving a scorpion design. With the deep brown insect hiding among exotic flowers, it looked original, fresh, provocative. Maria’s body was strong and well-proportioned, and her hands, with the fingernails cut short, were dexterous at any kind of craft. Although she was almost fifty, her eyesight was very good, and she wore her thick brown hair drawn up in a bun.

On the lawn outside, two cats from Africa yowled without stopping, but it didn’t sound like their mating call. Maria had bought these cats. Usually they made little noise, appearing and disappearing from the area around the house like ghosts.

“There were some problems at the office today.” Joe felt weighed down by care.

“I heard about that.” Maria glanced at her husband.

“You? Who told you?”

“Lisa. She stopped by.”

“Don’t listen to her gossip.” Joe impatiently threw his briefcase onto the sofa.

Maria rose from the side of the loom and walked past the dining table to Joe’s side, helping him put the briefcase on its stand. Afterward she laid her hand on Joe’s shoulder.

“Don’t be irritable, it’s nothing serious. You’re an old employee at the company. How could that old fox Vincent manage without you? Besides, Lisa came here for another reason. She’s having trouble at home.”

This was an odd thing, that Maria always called Vincent “old fox.” Joe had never understood his wife’s intuition about him. Joe didn’t think his boss was at all cunning. It was just that he acted a bit indecisive. But if his wife wanted to call Vincent an old fox, then let her. Joe didn’t care to question her about it.

“What’s the problem?”

“According to Lisa, it’s an Arab woman. Vincent has been hiding from his wife that he’s living with a woman who wears a black veil.”

“Living with? Doesn’t he go back home after work? I see him there just about every day.”

“That’s right. But Lisa says other people see her husband at the Arab woman’s house every day. How could that be? I think he must know some way to be two places at the same time.”

Joe couldn’t get used to Maria saying strange things, although she’d always had this habit. Her strangeness had been passed on to the two African cats. Not long before, the brown-striped female had even bitten their son.

“A man goes to work as usual, returns home on time, and has no vices, but is still seen every day at his mistress’s house. Isn’t this odd? Is it possible there’s another man? Yet he’s admitted to it. Lisa’s desperate. She’s up against something sinister.”

Maria returned to her loom as she spoke, alternating her sentences with the weaving of a few strands. As Joe fixed his gaze on the enormous scorpion, he felt a gust of cold air at his back. The whole room was filled with dense, cold air. Maria began to rock back and forth in front of him as though she were floating in a thin mist, and at Joe’s feet that treacherous cat was crouching. He staggered, trying to fight free of it so he could go upstairs to his study. Maria was mumbling to herself, but when Joe turned back to look, the seat next to the loom was empty. Where was her voice coming from?

It was only when he was seated at his writing desk opening a book by a Japanese author that Joe’s head finally cleared. He read the story aloud at the top of his voice, with a profound feeling that his life of late had been reversed, and everyday life transformed into a dreamland, one that was like a chain of interlocking rings. Even though the story Joe was reading was set in the East, the young woman wearing geta sandals walked leisurely into a square that he had already constructed in his mind two months ago, a place surrounded by parasol trees. She hid behind the thick trunk of one of the trees, and only a triangle from the lower hem of her kimono was revealed by the blowing wind. Joe read until his eyes grew dim and he had to stop.

As Joe and Maria sat together in the kitchen eating dinner, the cat ran over to them unexpectedly and wound itself around Joe’s legs, rubbing back and forth against his trousers and purring, wu wu. Maria’s gray eyes were calm and shone with light as she gazed directly at Joe. He was bending over to pat the cat on the back when his hand burst out in pricks of heat. Was it possible for the cat’s body to be electrified? Did Maria have such mystical power? Joe looked at his wife, puzzled. Her expression was rapt. Was she waiting for something to happen? What did she actually do at home all day, aside from household tasks? It seemed that his energetic wife had already made this house into a small personal kingdom.

Joe’s son Daniel was seventeen years old. He was at boarding school out west and came home only twice a year. It wasn’t clear exactly why, but the relationship between father and son was one of indifference, in part at least because each was inclined to be absorbed in his own little world. Joe didn’t know what his son’s interests were, but in Daniel’s vacant gray eyes he recognized the yellowed photographs of his own early youth. In general, Daniel was more at ease with his mother, and this was apparent also from his relationship with the two cats. It was as if the ghostly animals played the leading roles in a conspiracy planned by Maria and her son — Joe couldn’t help harboring this suspicion. He once encountered mother and son squatting under the flower trellis behind the house, discussing the two cats in voices alternately raised and lowered. Meanwhile, the cats crouched proudly on top of a stone table, holding their bodies very straight, as if they wouldn’t deign to pay the slightest attention to the talk of the humans. When Joe appeared, the conversation broke off short.

“My uncle’s family is taking this tapestry. Tomorrow they’ll be here to pick it up. Now I feel an emptiness in my heart.”

Maria cleared away the plates as she spoke.

“Why don’t you weave a story? One that contains all possible designs, where there’s nothing that can’t be worked in?” Joe said the first thing that came into his head, and regretted it immediately. He worried that his wife might question him more closely.

“I don’t have any such story in my mind, so how could I weave it? Watch out. You’re stepping on the cat’s tail.”

The cat shrieked in pain and ducked away. Joe stood awkwardly, then returned to his study upstairs. He carried the book by the Japanese author to the bathroom and continued to read on the toilet. There was a sumo match in the book. The huge body of a wrestler from the north, Xiao Jing, was pushed off the stage and his young son was crushed to death. The wrestler’s mournful silhouette disappeared into the dense mass of spectators. The loudspeakers started to broadcast an amazing sort of dirge. The music wasn’t sorrowful — it sounded like joyousness that was being firmly repressed by something. When he’d read this far, Joe’s eyes grew dim. Returning to the study, he became aware of how the story he’d been reading, set in the East, and the West, where he was in person, were converging on each other to form a separate, alternative space. He closed the book and turned his exhausted face to look behind him and up. This time a different story flourished in that different place, and a triangle of azure kimono hovered in midair. He heard the cat scratching at the door of the study, and it occurred to him: let the cat go ahead into this square, too. . where a rank of black dogs crouched in stillness off to the side.

Joe’s room was a typical bachelor’s bedroom. There were no pictures on the walls, no decorations, and only a few unconnected yellowed photographs set in copper frames. Of the photos, one was of a hat, another of a walking stick, another a tobacco pipe, and still others were enlargements of objects like false teeth or screws. There were some photographs where you simply couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be, such as a rectangular picture that looked like a brown path with something a little bit like porridge and a little bit like pigment flowing out of it. It left you feeling ignorant. The furnishings in Joe’s bedroom were conservative and compact, and no one could have discovered from them that their owner was a man of complex thoughts. Joe didn’t smoke, but there was an ashtray on the bedstand, and inside the ashtray a few small bones from when he’d had an operation on his knee. About five or six years earlier Maria had developed insomnia, and the couple now kept separate rooms. With Maria gone, Joe had quietly remade the bedroom into a bachelor pad. No cats or dogs were allowed inside. He realized that he was growing more eccentric as time passed. Maria’s bedroom was on the far side of his study. Before it had been bright and spacious, but Maria had taken dark curtains and shaded the two windows, and even during the day she kept a small purple lamp lit. One day Joe found himself thinking of her, and he walked over to her room. It was filled with a perfume that was familiar to him. Maria was just getting up and dressing. Without turning around she said to Joe: “You’ve come too late, Joe. How can you keep these things in your mind constantly? Look at this lamp: it burns day and night in my heart, making the pitch-black places shine brightly.”

They still went to bed together, and Joe was astonished by his wife’s fervor. There were even some things she desired that were unfamiliar to him, and at the height of her excitement her body stiffened upward and Joe saw two small purple lights shining in her deep, indistinct gray eyes. From that time on, Joe had not entered his wife’s bedroom. He was frightened of the abyss of her desire, and even thinking of it made his spine turn cold. “How can Maria be like this? She doesn’t love me at all.” Occasionally Joe would be sick at heart, thinking, “And then, she’s so lonely, although there’s Daniel. But he doesn’t call or write from school.”

Joe’s bedroom and study made up his own little world. The books in the study were piled up to the ceiling. Once in a while he would climb a staircase to vacuum up the dust. In the weng weng buzzing of the vacuum, Joe’s stories became like fishnets in the sun, fluttering in the wind. Recently he’d been coming across a lot of people from Japan, and these narrow-eyed visitors from the East would come and go at the edge of the square. If it was the height of the day’s heat, they would evaporate like water droplets. “Evaporate like water droplets, a beautiful metaphor,” Joe said to himself. About once a month, Joe straightened his books, placing them one by one on the floor and then putting them back on the wooden shelves in a new order. He didn’t have actual bookcases, so all the books sat on open racks. They weren’t particularly neat. Sometimes he would bring a book to bed and place it under the pillow. These were usually horror stories. He thought, by putting the book under his pillow, to suppress the disturbing violence of its contents. On such nights Joe’s dreams were filled with tempests, as though doomsday had arrived. Joe, who was normally a calm spirit, didn’t care for this feeling at all. But he still read thrillers one after another, sometimes even in the office, where his customers were able to see the fear written on his face.

Was Maria’s fondness for mystical things due to his influence? Or, conversely, was it Joe who was affected by her? When he’d calmed down, Joe thought back on the two lamps reflected in her eyes. The roses in the backyard also seemed to be electrified, and his hand recoiled like lightning from the petals. He even heard the slight sound of sparks flying. Those roses were in a large patch of bushes Maria had planted, where she and Daniel sat among the flowering shrubs in summer drinking tea. As Joe looked down on them from the terrace, their voices floated up into the air. Daniel said, “Mama, once you pass the well you’ll see the quarry.” Maria’s arid voice answered, “Everything is possible right here if you stay at home.” Joe sighed, thinking of what kindred spirits the mother and son were. But one evening Joe saw Daniel wrecking the rosebushes. It was the day before he was going back to campus. Daniel was like a terrifying ghost in the moonlight, his movements irresolute and hasty as he mucked in the soil until it covered his body. Joe couldn’t bear to call out to him, and so stood off to one side watching. Finally Daniel wore himself out, and covered his face with both hands. Was he crying? Joe knew that even as a child he’d never cried. The lamps in Maria’s room dimmed, then brightened. Against the curtains a long, thin silhouette appeared where someone must be standing. In this southern town everyone went to sleep very early and fell to dreaming. . Was this why they were all on the brink of madness?

When Joe was young, his father had looked him over without blinking. “Joe, Joe, how are you going to support yourself?” When his father said this, Joe had felt unbearable shame. He didn’t know what he would do to get by. Daniel was much stronger than he’d been then, and this could be seen in his movements as he uprooted the roses and tossed them in the air. In his heart Joe envied him a little. The son was much more like his mother.

Joe wanted to draw a picture, to make a rough sketch outlining the story that lay deep in his mind. Time after time he worked out the composition, and time after time he rejected it. One day, he summoned his courage and picked up a pen, but what he ultimately drew was just a line that looked like an earthworm. It was completely meaningless. The day he finished reading the Japanese book, Joe was seized with an impulse to visit Daniel’s campus and speak with him. It was a Thursday, and he needed to wait until Saturday to go, and by then his intention was already worn away from waiting. Even though he hadn’t seen his son, Daniel’s image slipped into Joe’s dreams. It was a body without a head, with a rose on the shoulders in its place. Joe drew a picture of his son from the dream. He showed this picture to Maria, who said, “I’ve seen this person you’ve drawn before, it’s an uncle on my mother’s side.”

The Rose Clothing Company didn’t get caught up in Vincent’s domestic difficulty, and its business wasn’t affected. The prevailing spirit was in fact one of success. Even if Reagan grumbled, his farm still needed the company’s clothing. He had just signed another contract with Joe for a not inconsiderable sum. Joe sat at the window of his office watching Reagan’s form disappear around a corner and imagined the natural scenery of that small place in the far south called the Cape. Reagan had to rush back that very day. He was always hurried like this, and Joe had the impression that his life was full of vigorous activity. Out in the corridor there was a ceaseless crowd of people coming and going, accompanied by the weng weng buzz of their conversation. Joe knew his boss hadn’t come to work that day. Everyone in the building knew it, too, but people avoided discussing it.

Taking advantage of the racket outside his door, Joe drew a new book from his bag. After reading a page, he was enveloped by drowsiness. The opening of this novel was very strange. It told of a large palace with a few guards standing about in the doorway. An old fellow carrying charcoal was trying to enter the gates to deliver it, but he was continually driven out. The old fellow saw a man who looked like a steward rush out as if to meet him and bring him in. But in his hurry he fell to the ground, and for all his effort he couldn’t reach the old man’s side. The guards stuck out thick arms and swept the old fellow away. He tumbled down with the coal he was carrying onto the stairs outside the palace gates. He could dimly hear voices calling from inside, “The emperor is arriving.” As Joe ruminated on the murky scene on the steps, someone outside knocked twice on his door. Joe didn’t acknowledge the knock. His eyes continued to rest on the page because of an illustration of a cat on the left-hand side. This cat wasn’t like those cats from Africa; it looked a little like the indigenous cats of Country F. Many years earlier, Joe had visited that country and seen the far too numerous breed of yellow-eyed cats popping out of the cracks in the earth. There were few tourists who hadn’t encountered them. What did the cats of Country F and that old man delivering coal have to do with each other? The knocks on the door grew louder. The doorbell rang. Why couldn’t this guy call for an appointment? Joe had no choice but to stow his book in a drawer and answer the door.

“Vincent! What’s the matter?”

Joe looked at his boss in panic.

“Everything’s fine. It’s just that Lisa’s become paranoid. I came to see you to avoid her. God, what are you thinking of, shut up in here like this?”

He was asking Joe and himself at the same time.

“Me? I like getting lost in my thoughts. It doesn’t affect my work, does it?”

“No, it’s quite helpful for your work. You also just signed a big contract. How could we get by without people like you in this company?”

He watched Joe with an expression of sincerity. Joe felt that his glance was overbearing, but in the depths of Vincent’s pupils he saw rays of light like those emanating from the eyes of the cat in the book he’d just been reading, a stern look of repressed bitterness. Maybe Vincent had some connection to that archaic nation? Maybe his Arab woman wasn’t an Arab woman at all, but an even more mysterious woman of Country F? Joe lowered his eyes, not daring to look at his boss, and he became the old coal bearer in the book he’d just been reading: he collapsed on the stairs, his ears strained to hear the people inside the palace gates, the footsteps of groups running back and forth, back and forth.

Vincent continued, “So, what about that thing we were talking about earlier? What are you thinking? I’ve been to places like that. I mean a thatched hut in the wilderness, and from its doorway you can see the mountaintops burned by wildfires. You should consider things like this seriously. Don’t give up thinking about them just because you’re indispensable to the company.”

Joe’s boss was plainly standing right in front of him, but Joe felt more and more as though his voice was emanating from another room.

“You might end up like me,” Vincent said, repeating himself so Joe would hear.

Joe was surprised and disturbed to discover that Vincent was smiling.

“Lisa came by my house.” He struggled to get the sentence out.

Vincent stood up, releasing his breath, walked around the room once, and stopped in front of the window.

“Today it looks like rain, so Lisa went out with her umbrella. No matter what she’s doing she always thinks ahead. How do men with wives like this live? I honestly can’t imagine what I’d do without her. . just as this office couldn’t manage without you.”

“So you’re still hiding from her?”

“Yes, you know everything. Now I need to go back and check on things. If she can’t find me she’ll toss all my files into the stairwell. Then I’ll have to send workers down to save them.”

Vincent slipped out without a sound, so quietly that Joe wondered if he’d even been real. To get at the reason he felt this way, Joe opened his book again and read a page of it. The story sank into confusion. This time the person falling down the steps wasn’t even the coal bearer; it was five palace maids. The maids were in disarray, climbing the stairs over and over, and each time they were pushed back by two fiendish guards. Joe’s eyes were drawn in fascination to the scenery within the palace gates. The interior was, oddly enough, an uncultivated flower garden filled with withered bamboo stalks. “The maids will never abandon their attempt.” Joe read up to this sentence. He recalled that his boss, Vincent, had just said a similar thing. He turned back to the beginning of the book and looked at the illustration of the cat on the first page. He found that the cat had lost its enchanting quality. The yellow eyes were lusterless. Returning to the previous passage, he read about the fountains in the garden. They were not manmade fountains; water from underground spontaneously leapt up through fissures in the earth. Some of the geysers were between ten and twenty meters high. The maids rushed up once again and were dashed back down, and the guards forced the palace gates shut. A gust of wind blew the maids’ long hair loose, tangling it and obscuring their eyes. An image rose up in Joe’s mind of a day in April, and an event that had taken place on the street in front of his house. That day, when he returned from work he saw his neighbors standing in twos and threes at the side of the road, looking ill at ease. Turning to catch what they were staring at, Joe saw a man and a woman dressed in rags walking slowly past, one before and one behind, looking straight ahead. What discomfited Joe wasn’t this sight but rather the feeling of his neighbors’ eyes on his back, as if their gaze could bore inside him. The couple walked on, but after a little while they returned. Joe felt the tension in the strained atmosphere, and he heard the creaking sound made by a kneading fist. The odor of spring rose from the damp earth.

“What’s the matter?” Joe couldn’t help questioning the old woman at his side.

“It was an earthquake. Didn’t you feel it? Everyone came outside.”

“But those two people. .”

“They’re not from around here. Shhh, be quiet.”

There hadn’t been an earthquake that day, so why were all these people deathly pale? The peaceful side street where Joe lived was full of secrets. Even Maria felt that the atmosphere there was oppressive. Her favorite platitude was, “Once something gets started, you might as well finish it.” It meant that she could take all the craziness around them and make things even crazier. That’s why in their house every object she touched was electrically charged, to some extent or other, and sometimes sparks burst out. What would the street look like if it really were fluctuating in an earthquake?

“Joe! Joe. .” Someone was calling him.

He opened his office door and saw Lisa, her face gray and filthy with dirt. Although she had lost her customary glamor, she showed a kind of touching charm.

“Did Vincent come looking for you? I just can’t catch up with him. Look at me in this state — you can see he’s done for.”

“No, Lisa, that’s not it. You need to be a little more patient. He loves you.”

“I’m not talking about that. Who said he has to love me? I’m talking about him. He’s scared to show his face — what’s he so afraid of? And there’s his disgusting behavior out on the lawn. . He was dressed up in formal wear and rolling around in the grass. His spirit’s shattered, but I wanted to help him recover. Now it’s too late.”

Lisa hopped up onto Joe’s desk and perched there swinging her legs provocatively. Yet the expression on her face was entirely serious, something you didn’t see often. She listened attentively, concentrating for a moment, then said to Joe, “There’s a magnetic field in your office. Vincent has known about it for a long time. He’s mentioned it to me several times. So I went to find Maria. Maria is a remarkable woman. As soon as I entered your house I felt like I was walking on thin ice. Maria, Maria, she’s exceptional!” Her husky voice sounded as if she were singing.

As she didn’t get down from the desk, Joe began to feel terribly awkward. Although the difference in their ages wasn’t very great, she was his superior’s wife. Joe had no idea how to deal with her frivolous manner; furtively, he hoped that someone would enter the room. But no one did. Lisa sat planted on that high perch. Already she’d forgotten Joe’s existence as she glanced back and forth along the cluster of buildings outside. Perhaps she was looking for her husband. Joe stealthily snuck to the doorway, opened the door a bit, and sidled out into the hallway. His secretary looked at him sympathetically: “That woman’s out for blood.”

Joe returned to his office, after taking a turn at the bottom of the stairs, to find Lisa already gone. What door had she used? She must have taken the elevator. She’d pulled out the book Joe had thrust under a pile of contracts and left a peculiar bookmark between pages 50 and 51: the shriveled corpse of a mantis. Joe set the rather large mantis at eye level and scrutinized it. Its yellow, jadelike eyes gave off a gleam he was already familiar with. He even felt its stabbing legs move between his fingers. On the surface of page 50, it looked like something had bitten a few holes in the letters. Could the mantis have done this? It had been dead for a long time. Well then, Lisa must have dug out the words with her sharp fingernails. While she did this she would have worn a look of rapacious concentration. What kind of woman had Vincent married? Joe put down the book, pressing the mantis inside as before. Now the shape of that enormous story in his head seemed a little vague, as if everything in it were becoming tangled together. Yet there was a borderland, extending to the sky above the North Pole, with masses of frozen clouds. Was the story he’d just been reading a story of Country F? Or a Nepalese story? Joe hadn’t gone over the details in the book’s introduction. He always started right in on the first page of a book, and then slowly entered into its web. Often the story’s background was one he developed for himself. Or perhaps it was all in his imagination. Invariably, as he reached the middle of the book, he began to suspect that the sentences were jumping from his head onto the page. Otherwise, why was it that when he assumed the story was set in Mongolia, the hunters wearing short gowns in the beginning section all began wearing long robes?

Vincent and Lisa vanished without a trace, all the way up to the end of the workday. Joe figured they must have gone someplace in the city, the two of them calling out unceasingly but extremely distant from each other. If they were to meet, they would have to cross a river. But the sky was already dark; the water was very deep; there were no boats on its banks. Joe walked to the bar on the corner. He looked inside and saw Reagan drinking alone at a table. Hadn’t he gone back home earlier? Joe stood riveted in place, staring. Reagan chased one glass with another, as if he were drinking water. There were some papers spread out on the table that might be the contract they had signed in the morning. He remembered what Reagan had said at the time, “The reenactment of tragedy is sometimes necessary.” Afterward, he’d affixed his signature to the agreement. Now he had spread the contract out on the table in the bar to look it over, but what was he after? Was he still thinking of those two workers drowned at the farm? His jacket had a dark stain on it. Probably he’d vomited. Even then the barkeeper didn’t make him leave. Maybe he needed customers; the place was really desolate. He stood behind the counter, obviously watching every movement of this drunkard, so as to intervene at any moment. Joe didn’t want to go in because in their relationship Reagan always took the role of the leader. When Joe thought of that scorching, glittering farmland, he grew dizzy, feeling himself inferior. Reagan lived there year in and year out, but he still ran to the gloomy city every so often. On the surface he came to do business and sign contracts, but who knew what he really came for? Every time he proclaimed that he was going back that same day. Could it be that every time was like today, when he didn’t go back but came instead to this low kind of place to soak himself in liquor? Reagan raised his blood-red eyes and stared in Joe’s direction. Joe knew Reagan hadn’t discovered him standing outside the window; he was terribly drunk.

“Do you remember Reagan, the farmer from the rubber tree plantation in the south?” he asked Maria.

“Yes, he’s a real man.”

Maria was putting a finished piece of tapestry into her chest. Joe realized that she had been selling fewer pieces. She seemed to be storing up tapestries. And she couldn’t afford to spend money as freely as before. Joe couldn’t help feeling sorry for her because she was giving up a few of her favorite extravagances.

“The sun must have fried that man’s brains,” Joe said.

“Nonsense. He’s a born thief, I can tell. He doesn’t have any brains.”

Maria locked the small trunk and drew out the key. Joe saw electric sparks, this time breaking out from the key. Maria made a sign to Joe, then turned and went out to the garden. He followed her closely.

A small table was set among the rosebushes, and a large pot of tea was set on the table.

Maria drank a sip of tea and said, “Did you know that from here Daniel and I can see everything in your study clearly?”

Joe was surprised and craned his neck in that direction, but he couldn’t see anything except a dark red brick wall and the creamy white balcony.

“Spectators have the clearest view of what goes on.” Maria smiled.

The Maria who lived in that house with its own garden wasn’t content with her middle-class existence, so she had developed a fascination with mystical experiments. Joe realized that she was conducting these experiments almost every minute of the day, and he also realized that they intimidated him. This was probably why he had hidden himself in his stories in the first place. There was another thing that bothered Joe, which was that after she started the experiments — with the tapestries, the roses, the cats all becoming her props — Maria grew extremely independent. Now even if Joe were to leave her and live elsewhere, she probably wouldn’t care much. Her relationship with Daniel was comparatively close. Joe believed that information often passed between them even though they were rarely together. Take the roses: to those two they acted as a magnetic field, but they had no such effect on Joe. The day when Maria sat there with Daniel and Joe had stuck his head out from the study, listening to their voices floating in midair, he was simply amazed. But today, as Joe listened to Maria, there was something masking her voice. Her body wrapped in a blue checkered skirt looked fake. He listened to himself speaking, and his voice was rebuffed, blocked by a metal plate that left behind a ca ca screeching. Maria extended a hand and held Joe tight when she saw he was trembling.

“Joe, how many years has this been going on?” She squinted her slightly narrow eyes, with an expression of one doing her utmost to remember something.

Joe mused that the answer she was seeking lay in his unfinished story. Maria held some event deep in her heart, such that every few years, no matter what decade it was, she would ask this same question. Perhaps that event hadn’t even taken place at a given time. All the periods of time she referred to were only periods that she differentiated for herself.

“I don’t know. I want my voice to carry, but it just makes a din around my ears.” Joe forced a smile. He was still trembling. He couldn’t remember his story.

Not long after they ate dinner, Maria disappeared into her room. Joe noticed that she’d even turned out the lamps. Joe knew she wasn’t asleep: she had a habit of mulling over her secrets in the dark. He had once compared her way of thinking to a tuberose coming into full bloom. Joe sat in his study and continued reading the third page of his book, gently fiddling with the mantis in his hand. The sentences snuck past his eyes until he felt he was being separated from the story. Joe too shut off the lights and sat in the lonesome dark thinking of Reagan’s rubber tree plantation. He had a sudden intuition that Reagan still hadn’t left. The bar was already closed, so where would the drunk have gone?

Joe emerged onto the street. He didn’t find Reagan, but he did run into the black woman he saw every morning.

“Sir, are you looking for someone?” the woman stopped walking to ask, furrowing her eyebrows as she spoke.

“Yes. He’s not from around here, and he’s drunk.”

“Go look in the underground crosswalk. He’s there crying.”

The woman walked away.

But the underpass was empty. It looked like Reagan had already left. The underground crosswalk was very gloomy at night; it brought out thoughts of homicide. It must have been an extreme compulsion from his heart that drove Reagan to pass from the magnificent sky of the south to this kind of place. When Maria said he was “a real man,” this was what she meant. Joe recalled Reagan’s appearance when he’d come to the office in years past, when Joe had thought of him as an optimist.

Coming out of the walkway, Joe took a few deep breaths in the damp night air. He felt he could go back to the story he’d just abandoned.