The Last Lover

3. WHAT HAPPENED ON THE RUBBER TREE PLANTATION

In the rubber tree forest Lisa saw the black-clad Arab woman. She saw a tall, black image drifting among the trees like a spurned woman, but none of the workers noticed her. Perhaps they didn’t even see her. An idea sprang to Lisa’s mind: “Vincent is done for.”

The primitive power of the rubber tree plantation left Lisa fearful, and she lost all certainty about herself. She made up her mind to return home at once. On the road back she came across olive-skinned Ida. Ida had been bitten by a poisonous snake and was groaning, holding a calf that was swelling gradually. The girl’s face grew red, as if she were about to faint. Lisa reached out a hand to prop her up, but was warded off. The strength in Ida’s hands was extraordinary. She almost pushed Lisa down to the hot muddy ground. She managed to struggle to her feet and then walked off, limping at every other step. Lisa felt deeply that her action had violated some principle of this place. What principle? She stared after the girl’s solitary receding figure, and failed to think of what that principle, after all, might be.

From a distance she saw Vincent walking toward a jeep on the road. Vincent’s elderly bearing caught her by surprise. She almost called out to him. But the jeep started up, and in a moment it had disappeared in a burst of hot air. The events of last night were similarly strange, even unbelievable, and besides she remembered only a few fragmentary, incomplete interludes. Those events seemed to have something to do with Vincent, but then again they also seemed to have nothing to do with him and were instead merely her personal secrets. The sky was quickly growing dark as her driver, Booker, rushed over from the banana groves, wanting to take her to a nearby restaurant. He said the restaurants and hotels around here closed up early, so they shouldn’t lose time. By the time they’d reached the thatch-roofed rural family restaurant, sure enough, it had already closed. Booker pounded on the door until a middle-aged woman, her eyes heavy with sleep, slowly opened it. She had to be told three times before she understood what Booker was asking and finally brought them into the hall. Lisa had just sat down when she felt something bite her ankle. After a while, she grew faint. In the dim lamplight she seemed to see Booker flirting with the middle-aged woman. Later on the two of them put a few small plates of food in front of her. She ate a large amount, but couldn’t say what she was eating. She thought it might be leg of mutton or something like that. She drank a few glasses of the local wine, a kind of sweet liquor. Booker and the woman didn’t eat. They merely stared at her without moving their eyes until she felt layer on layer of suspicion in her heart. She thought to look in her handbag for her purse, but her purse wasn’t there. She lowered her head to look under the dining table and saw a snake coiled around its leg. At this she screamed in fear. Booker and the woman kept on talking as if nothing had happened and then asked her, more or less without interest, if she wanted to go outside to enjoy the night view. She grumbled out a few sentences about how she’d been bitten by a snake, but mechanically stood up and stepped outside. She even forgot to bring her handbag, but the woman followed and gave it to her. Booker was definitely fooling around with that woman. Just now they’d looked too eager to wait any longer. The banana grove was as painfully hot as before. The mosquitoes made surprise raids under her long skirt. She walked on for a while and then thought it was no good. She worried that the mosquitoes would suck all the blood out of her body. Fortuitously, at this moment she raised her head and saw what had long been in her dreams: the green sky. Even the moonlight and Milky Way were green. She wondered whether the snake’s venom inside her was causing her vision to change. Then she heard someone calling her pet name from when she was a young girl. It was a woman whose voice seemed to be coming down from the tops of the tall coconut trees. Afterward she discovered that she had lost the road, and for the entire night she walked and then stopped, stopped and then walked. She made a circle around the lake, passing a low small hill; she circled the coconut groves for a long time; finally, she returned to the rubber tree forest. Although her head was heavy, she didn’t feel the least bit tired. She was woken by the workers who tapped rubber. She opened her eyes, and the first thing she saw was the black-clad woman’s skirt. Her cotton skirt seemed to have just swept past Lisa’s face. As she leaned on a rubber tree to pull herself up, her head cleared. But the woman walked too fast, and in a moment she was at the edge of the forest.

Lisa stood as before, distracted. She watched a red light filling the sky and something awoke in her heart. “Vincent, that old fox.” It was with a slight smile that she spoke to herself. This immediately led her to the thought: “Vincent is done for. He’s happy to be done for. I can enjoy my life.” She passed through the rubber trees and walked to the shore of the lake, where she stripped herself bare. She admired her own not-too-old nakedness before springing into the water. The water was extremely buoyant, and for a while it was as though the little waves were pushing her body to the surface. She was excited to the point of madness, so she started to swim with a butterfly stroke, which is the method of swimming that expends the most strength. When she was young she had often swum like this. She burst from the water and flapped ahead, quickly fluttering to the center of the lake. She turned back to look at the shore, where she saw three workers standing beside the lake smoking. The place where they stood was precisely where the pile of her brightly colored clothing lay. But evidently, these men didn’t care about her nakedness, since they weren’t turned toward her to look.

As she was swimming back, she felt little uneasy. Would these men confront her?

When she reached the shore she raised a loud racket. This surprised the three men, and they turned their heads toward her. Lisa provokingly set her hands on her waist and turned her body up toward the sun. But they didn’t approach her — they merely made ze ze tongue-clicking sounds of admiration. Lisa shot a glance at them, discovering that the three men were all handsome young fellows. Even through the coarse cloth of their work clothes she could see the rising and falling of their muscles, like bodybuilders’. Standing for a moment, Lisa found this hard to bear, and she bent to gather up her clothes. By the time she’d put them on, the three men had already walked a distance away. Lisa felt this must be the greatest humiliation of her whole life. She also felt deeply aggrieved to think that perhaps she was old. Hadn’t they been admiring her?

Lisa couldn’t find an answer to this question. The reason she stayed on at the farm was in order to find out the answer. She burned with desire, walking back and forth under the sun like a beast. This was when she ran into Ida. She wanted to draw nearer to the girl, but Ida pushed her away.

Ali stood on the stairs looking outside. Between yesterday and today, she’d already seen Lisa pass in and out of that patch of banana trees three times. It was her driver who told Ali who she was. This woman with fire-red hair appeared to be in dire straits. Her brightly colored clothing was already covered in dust, and her face was filthy.

“She’s staying behind, and her husband’s left,” Reagan said dryly.

“The fire in their hearts must be painful for both of them, to leave all their work at home and rush off to this kind of place chasing their dreams,” Ali replied.

“They didn’t just rush here on a sudden whim, of course.”

Ali looked back over her shoulder, but Reagan had already gone inside. He was tinkering with his fishing gear. Ali saw sparks flickering in the depths of his icy eyes, and from this she knew in her heart that he was already awoken. A fifty-year-old man must have all sorts of desires, and Reagan always perfected his schemes in the lethargy of sleep.

“Are you going fishing?”

“Yes. Last night I fished for the entire night. I sat on the window-sill and stretched my fishing rod out from there. Working high above the ground is really frightening.”

“Being suspended in the air always is. But how is the problem of transport resolved?”

“I don’t bother with that anymore. Let things start getting out of order. In the beginning wasn’t the farm in chaos?”

Reagan stood and hung his red fishing rod on a hook high up on the wall. Ali wondered why he would have painted his rod red. Perhaps he intended to frighten away the fish. Ali’s sight was a little dim; she saw the fishing rod on the wall turn into a dripping skein of blood. She left in a worried fluster. As she entered the living room she saw the driver, Martin, just leaving Reagan’s bedroom, with Reagan’s hunting clothes draped over his body. He was always stealing Reagan’s clothes to wear. This had become an open secret.

Martin ran with a thumping dong dong dong down the stairs, warding off Ali’s obstructing arm, and rushed outside. Ali heard a dog bark ferociously. Maybe it had taken Martin for a thief or a murderer. Ali couldn’t comprehend this habit of Martin’s. She’d seen him wearing Reagan’s black coat and trousers to a lawn picnic, where he stood around unsociably. Not only did he lack Reagan’s grave demeanor, he’d even lost his own customary clever liveliness. At the picnic he looked like a marionette swaying back and forth, cracking lewd jokes and making himself distasteful to every person there. Did he think that by wearing Reagan’s clothing he’d changed into a different Reagan?

One time he unexpectedly said, “Mr. Reagan’s intentions are obscene.”

“You work for him. How can you talk nonsense like this about your employer’s character?”

Ali said this with her mouth, although in her heart she hoped he would furnish a bit more information. But Martin stopped speaking. He wrinkled his brow seriously, and put on the appearance of thinking over some problem.

When Ali warned Reagan that someone was taking his clothes, Reagan said he’d known for a long time.

“Actually, I want to watch how other people play my role. Otherwise I have no means with which to arrange my life. Mr. Vincent is quite capable of arranging his life: look at the remarkable performance of his wife!”

Reagan made a few trips to the lake in succession, each time sitting there for the whole night. A forest keeper always came by at two in the morning, before dawn, to chat. In the past this forest keeper had not been a forest keeper. He was the region’s “wild man,” who lived by the lake in a thatched hut he’d built himself. At that time there had been no farm. His hair was white as snow, and when he spoke it was indistinctly, through missing teeth. Once he sat down he’d say a few world-weary things, speaking of how he’d already had enough of living. Also, strangely, at the weng weng droning of his speech, small fish would come up to the hook, usually enough to fill a whole bucket. Reagan’s gaze crossed his red fishing rod and fell on the opposite side of the lake, on those jet-black clumps of reeds, but Ida didn’t emerge even once. She’d gone into hiding.

“Before, around here, if you wanted something you could have it. The girls, they were all mixed up with the sika deer and you couldn’t tell them apart. They ran down from the side of that mountain in one big pack after another. Was it even girls or was it deer who carried on the war of the century with me in that shack?”

Reagan sensed that this old man had already seen through him. He hoped he would keep speaking, that he would bring up Ida, but he persisted in only speaking of the past century’s business.

Ida stepped on the body of the small snake intentionally; last week she had also been bitten once. Previously she had witnessed with her own eyes the death of a youth, not a local one, from a snakebite. What fear she’d been in then! Little by little she discovered that the farm people weren’t afraid of the snakes. Her next door neighbor Mina had a series of scars on her calves and arms but didn’t take a day of rest because of them. After a snakebite, there was a burst of red, a burst of swelling, and after that nothing at all.

Once she had left the dirty woman who was wearing a long, gaudy skirt, the soreness in her ankle lightened. As she passed through the banana groves, the forest keeper called out a greeting from his small wood hut. Ida was familiar with this old man, and she followed him inside.

She sat on a wooden stool, stretching out her right leg for him to see. He applied a few damp tea leaves to the wounded spot for her.

“Ida is already coming to terms with the snakes, little by little,” he said, lisping. “Here is your homeland. Right? You and that, that whoever, Mr. Reagan, you get together somewhere every night. I’ve seen everything. That one time, you wore black clothes to squeeze into his house, and fooled around with him there for a week. After that. . What am I talking about? Yes, you two are people who come from the same place.”

Ida was astonished at the old man’s acute memory. She couldn’t think of anything to say to refute him. Perhaps what he’d said had actually happened, who knew? It was the way of this forest keeper to not differentiate between things. It astounded Ida, while also enchanting her. Before she’d lived here very long she’d gotten to know the forest keeper. He told her he had seen her before, that she and the deer had lived together and often come to his shed. Each time, he spoke of Mr. Reagan as her lover. At first Ida found this this strange, but because the old man’s way of speaking about it was so particular, she was unknowingly drawn in. He often spoke of how Reagan had changed everything. Reagan had deprived him of his birthplace by force. He hated him. These snakes that bit but didn’t kill people, these rubber trees without even shadows were wholly unfamiliar. Yet Reagan swam back and forth, like a fish in water. “You are different,” he turned to say to Ida. “You and that man are the same sort of goods. You come from the same place and your homeland is connected to this place here. Everywhere waterwheels are turning. I tell you, after Reagan came, the lake had no wild ducks anymore.”

Ida could never figure out whether the old man really hated the changes to his environment. He used an enchanting intonation to describe things of the past, but what Ida heard was rather praising the present. He repeatedly said that this farm was Reagan’s farm, but Ida firmly set in her mind that he was the thick black shadow behind Reagan. When Reagan left his house, Ida saw numerous shadows dragging behind him. These shadows made his face as white as a dead man’s. Ida felt it was only at these moments that Reagan could finally draw her in.

The tea leaves applied to her leg only irritated the wound. Ida felt throes of pain. She reached out her hand to wipe the leaves off, but the old man blocked it.

“This effect is what’s wanted, you stupid girl. Think of the old toads in the swamp, think of them and you’ll be fine.”

Ida, in the midst of her pain, felt a sexual desire leap up inside her body. It was like that feeling just after being bitten by the snake. With her face reddening she strained to her feet and struggled to walk outside.

“That’s right, girl, but don’t fall down,” the old man said from behind her.

That night, she tested the lake’s depth once more. She was an expert diver, and without expending much effort she reached the center. After that she floated up to the surface of the water, and repeated this a few times. In the green sky there were all sorts of shouting sounds. She heard them all, and she knew that the person fishing on the shore heard them also. If not, why did he press down the reeds so that they kept making noise? Next, she heard her aunt speaking to her from underneath the water. In the past this aunt had often told people as a joke that Ida was too clever, she could calculate the moment of her own death. “A person of barely twenty who calculates the moment of her death — isn’t this abnormal? I won’t think of leaving Ida an inheritance. That would be the same as murdering her.” When her aunt had said this, Ida’s two older cousins were at her side, covering the smiles on their faces. Ida reached a hand down into the water and thought that she touched her aunt’s hard, prickly hair. Her heart was pained by love and pity.

“You really reached the bottom of the lake?” After a long while Reagan finally asked her, stammering.

The sudden sex caught him unprepared and afterward he couldn’t find the heap of clothing he’d tossed beside the lake. Fortunately his eyesight wasn’t as good as Ida’s: he couldn’t see anything clearly. In his head an unsuitable metaphor relentlessly appeared: “war between man and snake.” Sometimes he thought he was a snake, sometimes he thought his partner was a snake. At the beginning of their lovemaking Ida’s body swiftly disappeared. The snakes’ si si hissing was everywhere. Reagan hung struggling on a plateau of continuous climax. From start to finish he couldn’t find release. He recalled a sentence he seemed to have said: “Ida, you’re too frightening.” Afterward he was gasping for air. However, what he might, perhaps, have said was: “Ida, you’re too beautiful.”

Ida ran away on bare feet, carrying her shoes in her hand.

Reagan groped around on the ground for a long time before finally finding his clothes.

He faced the mirror in his bedroom. Inside the mirror was a blurring mist, and no matter how much he wiped it he couldn’t get it clean. He had no way to see his own face. Last night, his clothes had been wet through and full of mud, and Ali said he’d turned into a clay statue. But he didn’t think to change his clothes. His whole body burned like a flame as he paced, like a lunatic, back and forth across the bedroom. Ali kept on from outside, indomitably knocking at the door.

“Help find me a mirror.” He opened the door slightly, exposing half his face.

Ali returned shortly, and from outside the room she held aloft a round, antiquated mirror, which decades ago had been part of her dowry. Reagan looked into it, but the depths of the indistinct mirror were empty. After that Ali hid the mirror behind her back. “You’ve no need to look at this,” she said. “All things are hidden under this bit of land. Once it’s nighttime there are things that come out, and sometimes at noon, when the sun is right overhead, they also come out.”

Ali’s cumbersome body swayed like an old duck as she left. Reagan heard her going downstairs. At the same time he heard the sound of the desire inside his body ebbing, like unnumbered bubbles bursting in the water all at once. The first things to appear in the mirror were his two green eyes, before his entire aged face gradually emerged. Only in the deep recesses was there still a faintly discernable fog. “Ida, Ida. .” Reagan’s voice was at a crying pitch. Beyond the windows it was cloudless for miles. The burning rays of fierce sunlight opened cracks in the earth, while the workers wearing straw hats hid in twos and threes among the banana trees. There was a moment when he thought he’d discovered Ida. She was among those workers. He thought of going out, under the scorching sun, but his body trembled so fiercely he couldn’t stand up straight. He could not leave the house. “I’ve come to this,” he thought. “Why don’t I return to dreams?”

And like this he wore his filthy clothes, and fell asleep rolled up on the floor.

“Mr. Reagan took great pains in building up this farm, for more than twenty years?” asked Martin, feigning experience.

Ali looked at him disdainfully, as she heard right away the implication behind his words.

“Everything here is prospering. I’d think he could retire. Sleeping all day like this, not taking notice of anything, is about the same as retirement. He’s too hard on himself.”

“What if he gave his place to you?” Ali asked in return.

“Me? Sorry, I’m not interested. This business drives you to death. I haven’t been bitten by a snake, not even once, and I don’t want to be. Look at that window — isn’t that our boss standing there? Sometimes he doesn’t sleep at all, he’s surveying things instead. He’s been aging quickly, and soon he’ll have white hair.”

“Mr. Reagan is in love.”

“God, that’s frightening. I thought the farm was getting out of order.”

“Lately I’ve been worried about a fire. I stuck the fire department’s phone number on the wall.”

Martin went over to the well, pulled up a bucket of water, and splashed it head-first over himself so his whole body was left dripping. Yesterday he’d been loafing around outside wearing Reagan’s hunting gear when the outer jacket suddenly hooped around his neck so he couldn’t breathe. When he’d opened the buttons and thrown it to the ground, the feeling of suffocation grew even worse. He’d run, tumbling headlong into the lake. Immediately — the water hadn’t even reached his neck — his suffocation was alleviated. Water had had this capacity before. Just now when he’d been speaking with Lisa, he’d broken out gasping again, and cold water had come to his aid. How could this be happening? He’d never had asthma before. Martin had worked for Reagan for five years, and he’d long since grown accustomed to his employer’s eccentricities. He formulated a principle: meet the frightening without fear, the strange without wonder. He believed that he shouldn’t approach his employer in the same way he approached most people. So without the least care he did a few things out of the ordinary, including stealing the clothes and so on. When his conduct met with Ali’s rebuke, he was even a little pleased because it meant he wasn’t going unnoticed. But there was the asthma. Martin remembered something. Once, on the way back from a long drive, when they reached the farm Reagan said that he wanted to get out of the car to look around. So Martin stopped the car under the trees, and leaned against a tree trunk to nap. Suddenly, a pair of strong hands stretched out from the tree trunk and locked around his throat. His eyes flipped to white and his legs kicked blindly. He thought his day of judgment had come. He could see nothing. Without knowing how long he struggled, he heard the sound of Reagan’s voice by his ear. He opened his eyes. Nothing had happened at all. He was sitting in perfectly good shape under an old poplar tree. “You’re having bad dreams again,” Reagan said as he got into the car, glancing at him insidiously. When Martin started the car, he smelled his employer’s body giving off an unexpected, intense, thick odor of anesthetic, a smell strong enough to make him dizzy. On the road, still confused, he reflected that Mr. Reagan was the kind of man to firmly control his domain. His domain was his farm, and every matter here was decided by him.

In the past Martin had also thought of changing himself into someone like Ali. That way he could get used to being on the farm. But it was no good: his natural instincts were too crooked, so he was constantly punished. He knew that he was violating the customs of this place. It brought him happiness; still more the dread of death. Who could figure it out? It was impossible to say on what day the sorcery of Reagan’s farm would call for his life: think of those disgusting little snakes. Sometimes driving the car at night he’d crushed more than twenty to death all at once! After crushing the snakes, he always hallucinated, seeing the windshield crawling so full of them that he couldn’t make out the road signs. When he’d first come to the farm to take this job, Reagan had asked him whether he was allergic to pollen. He still remembered Reagan somberly staring at him as he asked this. At that time he took Reagan to be a bachelor with an obstructed heart, a man with a cheerless disposition. But events quickly proved him mistaken. His employer’s capabilities left Martin’s eyes wide and his mouth gaping. Although he couldn’t exactly say what kind of capabilities these were, nevertheless he always felt himself firmly drawn in, then afterward exploited. Martin wondered if he was harming himself by his own rash, rebellious nature. Otherwise, why was he always uneasy?

“Look at him, it’s like he’s stuck to the window,” Martin warned Ali.

Ali took the woven stuff in her hands and placed it on the bench in the arbor, stood up, and furiously criticized him:

“What nonsense are you talking about? Look, isn’t Mr. Reagan eating downstairs?”

Martin blinked. Mr. Reagan really was sitting right in the dining room. Through the glass door Martin saw two snakes crawling onto his back, although Reagan stretched and seemed quite pleased. Martin was about to enter the room, but was shouted back by Ali.

“Stay there! You’d better stand there, don’t move. What can you see, child? You can only see things that are already obsolete. Go change those wet clothes, you stink.”

Martin didn’t go to change his clothes. He went outside. Beside the old poplar tree where he’d leaned on the trunk to rest, he ran into Ida.

“Ida, are you looking for my boss?” He brazenly moved closer.

“I am looking for my diamond ring.”

“You have a diamond ring?”

“I don’t remember. If I find it then I have one.”

Ida used a sharp knife to poke a hole in the tree. Wood scraps scattered in all directions. Martin hadn’t realized the girl’s arms were so strong and he quickly backed away.

“Ida, that day when I fell asleep against the tree trunk, was it you who clutched my neck?” Martin shouted at her.

But Ida appeared not to have heard. After a short while she’d bored out a hole as big as a shot glass. Martin saw the tree branches violently shaking and the leaves rustled with a sha sha sound.

“Ida, Ida! Stop that!”

He didn’t know why he needed to call out.

“If you don’t stop, I’ll go get Mr. Reagan!”

Ida seemed to tremble. She disdainfully threw the knife to the ground and stood with both hands on her waist, looking at Martin. Then she squeezed out one word from between the cracks in her teeth: “Out!”

Martin took to his heels in fright, because he saw a poisonous striped snake on Ida’s shoulder.

He ran a long way, with Ida’s voice following him. It sounded like a stream of lascivious teasing, mingled with a few filthy words. Martin found her voice difficult to understand. He ran and ran again, his damp clothing sticking to his body. He became a drowning dog.

“Your diamond ring is inside the snake’s stomach, I’m sure of it.”

Ida’s friend made this statement to Ida while asleep, but tightly holding her hand as if she were wide awake. Ida knew it was dream-talk. She gently withdrew her hand and slid across to the screened window to look outside. The afternoon sun was at its most poisonous. Flies and mosquitoes surged in a frenzied chorus. Out on the road, an army of snakes braved the scorching sun and headed toward the apartment building. A few had already entered the main gate. Ida thought to herself that a large group of the snakes must be inside the building already. She certainly couldn’t go back to her own room now, because once she opened the door she would be besieged from all sides. The others must be taking afternoon naps. At this time of day, everything on the farm fell into a lethargic sleep, except the snakes.

Ida only indistinctly remembered that night with Reagan and the scene of the chaotic snake dance. The recollection of sex was almost horrible because it wasn’t clear if it was persons or snakes, with the soil underneath her body becoming quite hot, swelling and undulating. . Afterward it seemed that she had slunk away first, because desire is a valley that is impossible to fill, or that, in other words, she gave rein in order to capture. She heard Reagan murmuring a sentence from underneath her: “An orangutan in heat.” After he said this, his skull suddenly dissolved; the body without a head shook with a convulsion. This man was everywhere but also had no substance. Ida felt the wide mouth of her womb already incredibly frenzied. .

She wasn’t willing to renew these old dreams: she knew old dreams couldn’t fulfill her. From the moment the mountain torrent engulfed her small house she’d known this, so she had no way to make sense of what happened that night. Only if she built up a new dreamscape again, like the poisonous snakes doing tricks and striking attack poses outside the door. The first day she arrived on the farm, as she unfolded her young body under its tallest coconut palm, she saw those flickering snakes among the clumps of grass, and her intuition told her: this is your homeland and also your burial ground. At the time she still didn’t know who dominated this land, but she thought it would all make itself clear. Ali asked her, “How were you able to escape that place? It’s hard to imagine.” At first Ida hadn’t consciously observed Reagan, with his insidious green eyes. She thought of him as a depressing old bachelor. Until the time she discovered him fishing by the lakeside, when the evening mist mottled the image of his unmoving back, when she suddenly comprehended: in fact, all of this belonged to that somber fellow. This was the reason for that charade in the pub. Reagan erred in thinking their meeting there was by chance. It was directed with deep and considered care. Watching the man in flight, Ida knew her plot had already succeeded. Even so, the nearness of her target did not bring her the joy of victory. Those unsleeping nights, those lascivious voices deep in the earth, and the violent imprecations coming from the lake at times almost drove Ida to complete collapse. She’d dreamt of that business with the diamond ring, and after the dream she started searching for it outside. She had found many small jewels, sometimes in the gutters, sometimes beside the coconut shells people had thrown out, sometimes among the gladiolus petals, and sometimes inlaid into the scars on the tree trunks. The sky lightened, and placing them in the sunlight to look them over Ida made out that these were manmade jewels. Who was patiently going around in circles to toy with her? Regardless, Ida couldn’t shake off the seduction of discovering rare things. Besides, perhaps these jewels changed into real diamonds at night. On this farm, nothing was too strange.

Reagan really was in the dining room, but at the same time he was upstairs in the bedroom. He was with the black-clad Middle Eastern woman (here she is Middle Eastern) standing in front of the window and observing the movements in the thick grass below. As the woman walked about, her clothing made a sha sha rustle, like the falling of a rain shower. They didn’t speak. For Reagan, it was because he could hear all along the woman’s unceasing speech. He heard all of it, but didn’t understand what he heard.

As Reagan sat down to a meal at the table, he saw them. They’d heard a summoning call and slipped into the dining room, five of them altogether. One was especially impudent, and went so far as to latch onto Reagan’s throat. The black grain on its body matched the pattern on that woman’s skirt. No wonder that when the woman summoned the snake, it came. The egg in Reagan’s mouth proved hard to swallow because the snake had locked on tight. Heavy footsteps upstairs could be heard downstairs. Someone seemed to be taking off into the air. Reagan stood up from the table, then tumbled down. As he tumbled with a muffled peng, the snake wound around his neck released him, and it flew toward the foot of the wall. In a moment it disappeared.

The sound of irregular footsteps came down the stairwell.

“Mr. Reagan fell down.” Martin craned his neck to see inside the dining room.

“Don’t worry about him.” Ali spoke one word at a time.

She was watching the shadow of the black-clad woman in the distance, and she lowered her head as if lost in thought.

“Do you recognize this woman?”

“Why should I recognize her? She isn’t from the farm.”

The two of them watched the snakes gnawing at each other in the thick grass. Martin murmured, “A mess, a mess.” What he thought to himself was, “How can Ali let her employer lie there on the ground? She’s cold-blooded. She could be a poisoner.”

That was when Ali and Martin heard, at the same moment, a voice calling for help. They learned only afterward that two female workers drowned in the bay. One died right away. The thick heavy waterlogged work clothes cost her her life. There was a froth of blood in the nostrils of the dead woman.

Lying on the floor of the dining room, Reagan heard the news of the worker’s death in his dream. He stood in a dark, gloomy attic. Someone entered to report this event to him. He heard the man with a head like a mushroom say that the dead one was Ida, the girl from an island in Southeast Asia. At this Reagan heard thunder outside, then rain struck the leaves of the Chinese banana trees. He wondered: On this farm where there were no high mountains, could there be a sudden, torrential mountain flood? The mushroom-headed man went downstairs. Oddly, though, Reagan didn’t hear the sound of footsteps. There were a few old books in the attic. Reagan casually caught up a small volume with a colorful cover and opened it to its first page, which was printed with an engraving of the owner of the attic — a small portrait of the proprietor. The man’s deep-set gray eyes revealed a deep world-weariness, and his arms were covered with long, thick hair like an animal’s. The owner of the attic had signed an agreement with Reagan so he could stay on Reagan’s farm and build a house there. Reagan remembered that this deal was also struck in a dream. At the time he’d had a vague notion that this man’s building might become his own refuge, and for this reason he agreed to allow him to build a small house on the low hill next to the bay.

When Reagan woke up, Ali had already tidied up the dining room. Reagan asked her about this business with Ida. Ali raised her eyebrows in astonishment, saying, “Ida just came by to borrow a sickle from me.”

“Did someone from the farm fall into the water?”

“The message was a mistake. Rumors are flying everywhere these days.”

The image of Ida carrying a sickle in her hand floated into Reagan’s brain, and his heart palpitated nervously.

“Ali, have I signed a sort of agreement with someone, I mean, an agreement to let a man build a house on the farm? I’m concerned about this.”

“Yes, you have. Do you regret it?”

“Oh, not at all. Doesn’t this kind of life need a force from outside to break through it?”

He glanced toward the window, and saw outside that the sun was still shining brightly. There were several hawks wheeling in the sky. Was it because they’d discovered a corpse? For the first time in his life, he felt that his farm was too large. To oversee it from every angle would be simply impossible. A few years ago he’d bought the bordering farm, connecting it with his own rubber tree plantation to form a single piece of land. It was originally a farm for many kinds of industrial crops, and as soon as he bought it he’d regretted it. From then on, he hadn’t gone once to inspect it. He had handed the entire place over to a manager for supervision. He felt he was already aging. He couldn’t manage as many things. Why did he go on buying land? It seemed as though this decision to purchase would be his lifelong riddle. The hawks flew over from that farm, so they must have heard, too, the news of their new master. Before this they had never flown into his airspace. He knew that at the same time he expanded his territory a kind of expansion was progressing underground. It wasn’t something people knew about. He could sense this expansion that couldn’t be seen; however, it was hard to describe. When he went to the city on business, the feeling of expansion became incredibly intense. On its dark and narrow streets, he walked into a different world. For example, that African woman, the street cleaner, belonged to a different world. Reagan at any rate was unable to understand her kinds of desire and her disdain for him.

“What did Ida borrow a sickle for?”

“She said it was to cut grass. She’s always doing strange things.” Ali sighed.

“Why is Ali sighing?”

“When I think of this child running away from a place like that, it just seems unbelievable. Can you imagine the sight of a rushing mountain flood?”

“I can’t. In a dream I was saying, Fall, fall, let loose the mountain torrents. But here there are only low hills. How could there be a mountain flood? You’d have to ask Ida.”

“Ida forgot about it, a long time ago. There’s no way of remembering an event like that.”

Lisa flew past along the asphalt road. The skirt she wore was already so dirty you couldn’t make out the color. Reagan thought she was running without a goal. Heavy clouds floated on Ali’s face as she silently walked into the kitchen, thinking of the woman’s grievous story.

The two of them heard, at the same moment, the sound of steps upstairs, although there was no one upstairs. They looked with care and listened with care, one standing on the stairs, one standing in the kitchen. It didn’t sound like a person’s footsteps. It sounded more like a large bird, perhaps a hawk. Reagan wondered if it could be the smell of a corpse spreading from upstairs. Someone flew down the steps. This was a person. It was Martin.

“Martin!”

“What is it, Mr. Reagan?” He blushed, hiding the large bag in his hands behind his back.

“You aren’t afraid of hawks?”

“Of course I’m afraid.” He laughed, “But there’s nowhere to hide. It drops like a guillotine, cutting your body. Your body and your head are separated instantly. You don’t have time to reflect on it.” With this last sentence he raised his voice, as if making a joke.

It was Reagan’s turn to blush. On the open expanses of the flat-lands, he had been pursued by hawks before. He thought once again of Ida borrowing the sickle. That dark, dusky night, a muffled thunderclap under the earth had shaken his mind into a black pitch. He said to himself: “Climax is an inferno. Because the delight of not reaching release is in the elimination of the body.”

“Good, good.” Martin smiled again, seeming to see into Reagan’s thoughts.

Lisa fled swiftly from the scorching sun. Her feet were blistered with walking, but still she couldn’t stop. Everywhere, underneath the soil of the farm, there were people conversing, all kinds of people, all kinds of voices. She thought it wouldn’t take even a few days before she grew used to these voices under the ground. At night she sometimes slept underneath the rubber trees, and at other times at the lakeside. The snakes had stopped encroaching on her and stayed far away. Even so she distinctly heard the sound of their slinking in one group after another as they dove to the earth’s core. She thought of Vincent. What was Vincent? He was her dream, the dream she hadn’t woken from for many years. And Vincent also lived inside of a dream. She remembered him saying to her that he was going to the farm he’d seen in his dream. Because of the dream he came here, and then he left. But she, following the landscape of his dream, remained lost inside that landscape. Now she was so strong Vincent wouldn’t even recognize her. Just before dawn, she carried on a conversation with Ida.

The two women did not speak about their own homelands. They talked rather of the great deserts in Africa and life in tents in the desert. The two of them cherished an unusually strong aspiration toward a way of life they’d never experienced. Ida wielded a large sickle in her hands, moving back and forth across the clumps of reed. Lisa asked her what she was cutting.

“Whatever’s there I’m cutting. At least, I want to cut down a few things.”

Lisa lowered her head and saw that her own shoe was almost chopped in two.

“Before much time passes you won’t need these shoes,” Ida said, unconcerned.

Her words amazed Lisa. She sat there lost in thought, and didn’t notice that the girl had left.

In the distance there was a car driving toward her, like a blue-shelled insect. Against the golden ground it was utterly conspicuous. Lisa grew a little nervous, without any reason to be. She stood still since there was no way to walk with that shoe. The car gradually came to a stop beside her. The driver Booker’s straw hat extended from the window. This wasn’t her car, her car was a milky yellow color. But she got in anyway.

“Where did our car go?”

“This is our car,” Booker said.

“How come it’s this color then?”

“You’re going color-blind. It happens to everyone who stays here for a long time.”

“You’ve been here before?” She was surprised.

“Yes. This is practically my homeland. Is it like that for you? They all say the farm owner went mad ten years ago.”

Lisa recalled the cheerless gentleman in the sales office and couldn’t help a bitter smile.

When the car drove past the entrance to Reagan’s house, Booker stretched his head out the window. His face showed his confusion. As if absorbed by his thoughts, he whistled. Lisa saw Reagan walking out of the building. His figure was cut in two at the waist and in the middle was a section of blank space. In his hands he carried fishing tackle.

“We all turn toward this place, because the soil here can catch fire,” Booker said.

“How do you know?” Lisa asked curiously.

“Yesterday I tested it. The golden earth is just like coal. Miraculous earth!”

He suddenly looked heavy with drowsiness. Lisa worried that he might overturn the car in a ditch.

The car accelerated. It was like a bullet running madly along the burning soil, yet Booker, uncaring, bent snoring over the steering wheel. Lisa’s body sweated like rainfall. She realized the car was no longer on the road, which could be felt from the bumping of the wheels. She shoved Booker. Booker kept sleeping. She looked at the speedometer and found that the needle was broken. “Will we plunge into the gulf?” Her mind oozed this thought. She couldn’t make out the landscape outside for the sea of fire that filled her eyes. The car was unbearably hot inside.

“Booker! Booker!” She screamed until her voice was exhausted.

Booker moved a bit, and murmured, “Don’t get so excited, this will be over soon. .”

Lisa thought he was trying to kill himself. In desperation she tried jumping from the car, but the door wouldn’t open.

As she flailed frantically, the car came to a stop with a thud, dong. Booker still hadn’t woken up. All at once she could open the door. A burst of hot air blew in from the still-fierce sun. Their car had stopped in a patch of peach trees that were all on fire; the light from the flames lit up the sky. Lisa promptly hid herself in the car.

“Every so often they catch fire,” Booker said, with an expression of remorse. “We’ll leave the farm soon. Everyone is saying that a worker died. She must have jumped into the lake because her body caught on fire.”

On the road home Lisa fell asleep. She had many dreams, but the backdrop of her dreams was too dark, and nothing could be seen clearly. When she woke Booker told her she had been calling for a girl named Ida. He asked her who this girl was. The name sounded familiar. She told him it was Reagan’s girlfriend. On hearing this Booker was struck with wonder and couldn’t close his mouth for smiling. “Everyone knows that man has no substance. Just ask anyone on the farm and you’ll learn.” Lisa wondered dispassionately what it must be like to have no substance. Booker seemed to hear the words in her heart, and went on to say, “With no substance, he can pass through a sea of flames.”

Lisa sighed. “What kind of woman is Ida?”

She and Booker returned home, but Vincent wasn’t there. The rooms retained the look they’d had when she left. There was no apparent sign that anyone had come through. Lisa thought that Vincent might have already disappeared from their house and become a man without a home. Although he wasn’t there, Lisa could still smell his odor, a smell she hadn’t perceived before, which hinted of anesthetic. Shrouded in this smell, she and her husband were closer at a distance. Perhaps Vincent was staying in the slum district, in the underground tunnel shaped like a well that slanted as it extended into the depths of the earth, with a few lit candles along the way.

Lisa entered a dream. In the dream she had no need to go looking for Vincent because, like a hound following its quarry, he pursued her. Where Vincent was were also beggars, beggars eying Lisa greedily and menacingly, but they didn’t want anything from her. Lisa strove in desperation to enter the small crisscrossing and interlocking alleyways. She was conducting a battle of wits with Vincent. But Vincent met each changing situation with one response. He oozed out from underground like a rising mushroom cloud; the cloud dispersed, and he stood surrounded by a crowd of beggars. Halfway through Lisa woke and saw the palm tree — patterned curtains shaking, intermittently rolling like the high tide, before she tumbled back into the dimly lit midst of unreality.

“Vincent! Vincent! Aren’t you lonely?” She strained to shout, but had no voice.

She remembered that a vacuum doesn’t transmit sound. She almost despaired.

But from a distance Vincent raised his eyebrows at her and made an ambiguous gesture. The beggars turned toward her with loud lewd laughter. Lisa suspected that she wasn’t clothed. She couldn’t confirm this, because she couldn’t see her own body. She remembered that episode of nakedness on the farm, although the feeling then had been entirely different. Why must Vincent be among those beggars? When he approached, Lisa saw that he, like the beggars, wore a lewd expression. She couldn’t keep her face from reddening. Vincent stopped in his steps. It appeared he didn’t wish to approach her too closely. What was he thinking? Vincent, the owner of that immense and orderly clothing business, had unexpectedly hid himself in dark causeways, associating with beggars! Lisa thought with apprehension of the recent torrent of order forms. .

Outside the window there were water birds calling. Their house was in the center of the city, so where had the birds come from?

“Ma’am, those aren’t birds. It’s me mimicking them outside your window.”

Booker, his whole face filled with a smile, sat opposite her. He had obviously recovered from the fatigue of the previous day. His appearance was a little eccentric: a large specimen of a spider was stuck to his forehead.

“A gift from the farm. Night and day I am inside a spider’s web now. I managed to catch it at the door of a restaurant; once I caught it, it died. My lover and I made it into a specimen together. Its gigantic web is just like mosquito netting!”

Vincent was in fact working at the company’s head office, just as before. After returning from the farm, he described his mental outlook as being “as calm as water.” The Chinese woman (here she is Chinese) came to his office once. She wasn’t wearing a satin qipao, but was dressed like a worker who cleaned the streets, with a pen stuck in the pocket of her jacket. On entering she rounded the desk with practiced movements and sat on Vincent’s knee. She drew the pen from her pocket and wrote characters on the desktop. The characters she drew were like square rooms, stably nailed to the paper; each single one was correspondingly independent. As Vincent leaned in to look, he saw there was nothing on the paper. Vincent felt the woman’s body to be unusually light. When she twisted around to stare at him, he saw square rooms in her black eyes.

His desire was aroused again by this peculiar woman, but he sat there without moving. He thought if he moved even just a bit the woman would disappear. He thought of how this was another form of being “as calm as water.” The crows on the rooftop across the street made a sudden, slight sound. The woman stood with a start, and walked outside, and Vincent went with her. Later they went to her home. Vincent believed it was her home — if not, then what place could it be? It was a dark room on the twenty-fourth floor. In the corner was a gigantic spider weaving a web. He reflected that the gray spider looked familiar. Vincent and the woman lay down on the double bed, but their bodies did not touch.

Afterward, he went daily to the twenty-fourth floor after getting off work, forgetting that he should return home. During the day his job was very busy. The company was expanding daily. Inside the factory the machines roared, and outside the factory there was heavy traffic. Vincent hadn’t intended to expand the business. The circumstances of its development were beyond his control. He saw that his enterprise was spreading in all directions, like the background of the stories Joe had divulged to him. These days when he saw Joe in his office, Vincent felt perplexed: how did his business come to have an employee like Joe? All along he’d referred to Joe in his heart as “a two-faced man.” On Reagan’s farm, when in the midst of unreality his passion caused him unbearable suffering, he had thought more than once of Joe, as well as of those books hidden in his office. Perhaps it wasn’t by chance that Joe had taken a job in his company? But he did not remember that event from twenty years ago too clearly. The sole impression he retained was that at the time Joe didn’t like to speak. When he opened his mouth he grew very anxious.

The Chinese woman had never spoken before. Vincent surmised that she used a different system of language. The door to her room was always unlatched, so he pushed it open and went in. At times she sat next to the bed, at times she sat before the window, and when she sat by the window, Vincent stood behind her and saw numerous square-shaped characters in the sky outside. The pieces of the characters kept shifting, seemingly very busy. The woman was evenly proportioned and of average height, and, as before with the black-clad woman, he couldn’t determine her age. Vincent saw her as his lover, but he wasn’t eager to touch her body. He thought, for no reason, that if he touched her he would drop into a depthless void. Although he saw her sitting in the old twenty-four-story high-rise every day, he still couldn’t refrain from suspicion: was she from Reagan’s farm in the south? Although the geographical location of Reagan’s farm was in the West, the landscape had a concentrated flavor of the East; therefore, he could go there to pursue the Eastern woman from his dream. She looked so lonely, with a mind clear of desires, just like a dream. Perhaps she truly was a different woman’s (for example, the Arab woman’s) dream? Vincent thought that many such women must be hidden within this overcast city. Hadn’t he already known quite a few of them? Some of these women stayed for a while in shabby hotels, some rambled around in remote side streets, and some, like this Chinese woman, had a room in some tall high-rise. . Vincent was a little distracted in his mind, a little dizzy in his head. He came to a stop leaning his hand for support on a large cabinet. He saw the woman showing her teeth as she smiled at him. Her teeth were slightly yellow, as if from smoking, although there was no smell of cigarettes in the room. The woman made a sign for him to sit by the bed.

As soon as he sat down, the woman came over and embraced him, sitting on his knee. Vincent was immediately excited. As their naked bodies stuck together, he heard the sound of flowing waves inside her body. Then he was lost in the incessant up-and-down motions of deep water. This one time, Vincent’s bodily desire was finally released. This kind of release wasn’t gained through reaching climax, but rather was in a change of direction halfway through. As for Vincent, in this sexual encounter he lost all his perception. Before, with Lisa, he used to imagine himself as a tropical animal, like a zebra, and through that kind of fantasy he grew thousands of times more amorous. But with this woman it was a different matter. He abandoned fantasies about himself, following her into a drifting world of water. Together they entered dark ravines and made love there. A voice was always in his ear: “Is this the sea or is this a lake? Is this the sea or a lake?. .” He thought it ought to be the woman speaking, but she’d shut her lips and eyes tightly in the deep, swaying water, and was not inclined to speak at all. Vincent’s fervor ran high as he felt himself using his mind to make love. He tried his utmost to recover his amorousness, but he was defeated. The undulation of the water favored their sexual rhythm. The manifestation of his flesh and blood became unimportant. There was a brief time when Mr. Reagan’s rhythmic groans could be heard from some distant place. Once Vincent heard them he understood the implication of the groans. Could it be that this was the lake on the farm? The Chinese woman’s body was agile as she constantly varied her position. Vincent’s own body, in these peculiar movements, also became young. Yet there was no climax of flesh. He suddenly understood one thing: the reason there was no obvious climax was in order to avoid the listlessness following climax.

He didn’t want to leave the bed. He reached out a hand and kneaded the woman’s breast with his fingers. But at once he felt a sliding under his hand and the woman disappeared. On the empty large bed it was only himself left over.

He left the tall building still endlessly agitated and unable to reflect. But his desire wasn’t entirely for sex. What was the impulse then?

When Vincent raised his head, he saw crows. What startled him was that the crows’ bodies were soaking wet. They lined up in a long row on the banister of the balcony, combing their feathers with their beaks. Was it possible they had also just swum in the waterways of love? A woman wearing a white skirt appeared on the balcony, and the birds, hu, with a caw, all flew away. The woman leant her head down and saw Vincent. She made a face at him and, turning her back, dampened a few potted flowers on the balcony with her watering can. Evidently, she didn’t notice the drenched crows. The woman’s face was ruddy and filled with the freshness of morning; Vincent noticed her chest was shapely, the sort that sets men off on flights of fantasy. But Vincent’s flight of fantasy was about another woman, with a foreign kind of sex appeal that couldn’t be seen from outward appearance. Only on reaching the water did it finally take on a different look. Using Vincent’s poor words to describe it: “Lascivious and ethereal. Greedy as a valley that can never be filled; but pure of heart, with few desires. .” He suddenly thought of Reagan in the south, thought of him in the water, emitting painful but longing groans. Was the blazing sun of the south mending the wound in his soul? What kind of injury was it?

When he reached the office, Reagan was already sitting in the reception room. His appearance was greatly altered, his thin haggard face covered in sunspots. An injured eye twitched incessantly.

“Mr. Reagan, your eye. .” Vincent looked at his friend anxiously.

“A souvenir left by my pets,” Reagan answered.

He stood before the gigantic window of the round office. His formerly tall figure seemed suddenly to have shriveled. His leather shoes were covered in dust.

“I’m not here because of business.”

“Of course not.” Vincent spoke with understanding, watching him with still eyes.

“The whole farm is catching on fire. I think I’ve lost control of it.”

“This morning I saw wet crows. .” Vincent irresolutely mentioned.

“Of course, I saw them, too!” Reagan grew agitated. “A thick mass of crows, like a black cloud, dove from midair down into the lake. It was a collective suicide, a truly magnificent sight. But they didn’t really die, did they?”

Vincent thought to himself that people and animals who harbored astonishing ideas were not able to die so easily.

Reagan abruptly invited Vincent to go with him to a bar. Vincent hesitated, because he never went to such places. But then he felt ashamed of his hesitation.

When the two of them sat down on the bar’s high stools, some young people in the room were quarreling. Reagan glanced sharply at Vincent with his dropsied eye. It was as if Vincent’s cheek had been bitten by a snake. He let out a shout of pain.

But Reagan didn’t drink. Vincent finished two beers while the level of Reagan’s brandy didn’t move. Vincent wondered what he’d come here for, since he was not drinking. He watched the hairy backs of Reagan’s hands traveling back and forth along the tabletop, trembling awfully as if from anxiety. Suddenly he must have thought of something, because he got up and walked away without looking back. Vincent promptly paid the check and went out. When he drew abreast of him, Reagan asked, “Do you know the cleaner for this street? A beautiful black woman.”

“Joyner? You’re looking for her?”

“No, not looking for her, only asking some questions about her homeland. You are close by, haven’t you ever seen her in a dream?”

“Why would I see her in a dream?” Vincent asked curiously.

“Because. . because so many memories are written on her face that no one can succeed in escaping her. Sooner or later you’ll have to deal with her. Look, could she be hiding in this flower shop?”

The two walked in unison into the darkened shop. They heard a burst of confused sound behind the shop and then it was motionless and quiet.

“Something terrifying happened here, in this room!” Reagan spoke in a low, panicked voice.

Vincent wasn’t nervous. He was thinking of his Chinese woman. Could she have some implied relationship to this “beautiful black woman,” like intertwining vines? They didn’t live far apart, so it was quite possible the women knew each other. People on this street all knew warm, eccentric Joyner. Vincent’s company often ordered flowers from her. But Reagan continued sniffing back and forth in the air, his whole body shivering with fear.

Vincent could smell only the fragrance of the potted flowers. In the dark he couldn’t even see what kind of flowers they were. Reagan passed the flowerpots and walked to the rear of the room. By the time Vincent made up his mind to follow him, Reagan had already disappeared. Behind the room was a small, narrow courtyard with a staircase leading up to the building. Vincent stood in the courtyard, lit a cigarette, inhaled, and fell into heavy thought.

There was no doubt that he had been to this place before. It was yesterday. Those steep and narrow steps led to a balcony above. He’d stood on a diving board on the balcony’s edge, closed his eyes, and jumped down, reaching the deep water. It was just then that he discovered he could breathe like a fish. How had he forgotten all this? The “entrance” was actually here, and Reagan had known this for a long while. It was possible that his Chinese women also went into the world of water through this entrance. He thought again of Lisa; he thought of the Arab woman; he thought it possible they had all come to this place. Joyner’s greenhouse was the genuine entrance to the world. And the beautiful black woman was the gatekeeper to this world. On this small side street, Vincent had once seen her eagerly seize a customer’s jacket. The two had almost come to blows.

Vincent, in the midst of his confused fantasy, heard the sound of footsteps on the staircase — not just one person, but the sound of many footsteps. The footfalls came closer and closer, but only one person came down.

“Who came down with you? Those women?”

“Them? There’s no one there, they’re only a few shadows,” Reagan said despondently.

“What is upstairs?”

“Upstairs? Everything is upstairs. But I can’t remember. Tell me, what is this place?”

He grew agitated and left the flower shop without turning back to look. Following him, Vincent heard a loud upheaval in the dark behind him. The flowerpots tipped over one after the other. Vincent couldn’t stand to look back. All of a sudden he saw a row of wet crows settling on the broad windowsill of the flower shop. A black hand stretched out from within, unhurriedly setting down birdseed. “So the crows flew off from here!” Vincent exclaimed. His spine ran cold.

“Hui Mingxia!” Joyner’s clear, sharp voice flew out from the window. The name she called was Chinese.

Vincent kept a tight watch on the window. He believed Joyner was calling to his Chinese woman. But no one answered.

Reagan walked on at a distance. Vincent ran urgently to catch up with him.

“I’m going to the train station and returning to the south.” Reagan’s voice had a derisive overtone.

“Well, I’ll see you off.”

“You should pay more attention to people like Joyner. You are so close to each other. She and I are very close, too. Every time I come to the city I discover this.”

At the train station Reagan stepped onto the northbound train. He’d said to Vincent beforehand, “I always get onto a train at random. And, randomly, whatever train it is reaches home.”

On the road back to the office, Vincent reminded himself by saying: “Hui Mingxia, Hui Mingxia. .” In front of the office building he saw Joe and asked him where he was going. Joe said he was going to meet his client Reagan, who was on the train to arrive in the city at three in the afternoon.

“People from places like that enjoy making sudden attacks.” Joe looked troubled.

Vincent saw that Joe was putting a thick book into his briefcase.