The Last Lover

9. IDA’S LIFE IN EXILE

Ida thought she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches. She sat at the bar counter, ordered a glass of red wine, lit a cigarette, and inhaled two puffs, feeling dizzy and elated.

The owner of the bar was her fellow townsman, a man a little over forty who looked like an old ape, with small eyes always staring straight ahead. The bar was a family business. The owner’s wife and daughter both worked in the restaurant. On holidays Ida came here to help out. Ida’s movements were nimble, her mind agile, and she attracted customers. The owner’s wife wanted her to stay, to become a member of their household.

The bar was in an out-of-the-way spot. A green neon light, which flickered like ghostly eyes, was set on a grapevine trellis out in front of the restaurant. It was by chance that Ida had come here. Once she arrived she fell in love with the place, then, unexpectedly, discovered that the owner was from her hometown and the bar’s customers were all to her liking. For the most part, customers arrived one after another around midnight. Almost everyone walked, very few of them drove. Without anyone realizing it, the seats at the counter and in the large dining room filled. People kept straight faces, spoke in lowered voices, and discussed serious issues in groups of two and three. The owner, Alvin, told Ida that the tone of the bar came about naturally, and only people who spent all day in illusions liked to come here. When they arrived, they poured out to each other the nightmares pent up in their hearts. Alvin called this “woe telling.” Ida didn’t come to the bar for woe telling; she had been attracted by the bar’s name. From a distance she saw the neon lights on the dome spell out two words, Green Jade. She still remembered how things had been that night. She’d walked a long road, roaming nearly all the large streets and small alleys of the city, until at last she reached this corner. At that point she had already made up her mind. If this bar were still not what she was looking for, she would go instead to a certain storefront and sleep there, leaning against a marble wall. But her luck had found her.

Now, in the dim lamplight, with the sound of many whispering voices in her ears, the times she had made love with Reagan often floated up in her mind. The place was sometimes in the thick grass next to the lake, sometimes among the rubber trees, and once, to her surprise, in the middle of the main road. The time, however, was always the middle of the night, without exception. She was unwilling to go to Mr. Reagan’s bedroom because she worried she might faint in a place like that. More than once she thought of how funny it was. What if people on the plantation knew that their boss turned into a beast at night? What would they think? A young woman, nearly drunk, greeted her. She was an old customer of Ida’s. “I saw your old sweetheart,” she leaned close and said in a low voice. “He’s whiling away time in the city, too.” The young woman applied purple lipstick. Ida felt fish scales growing all over her body. The owner busied himself behind the counter. When Ida first arrived, she had talked with him about the mudslide in her hometown. The man appeared calm, but in his memory the event was quite clear. His whole family had died. The owner’s wife was a Western woman, and their daughter also looked entirely like someone from the West, but the closeness among the members of this family was of a kind that’s quite rare. If they were apart even for a short time, they would call out, summoning each other. Perhaps because of this closeness, the daughter didn’t go to school and served customers in the restaurant instead. This beautiful girl had a calm nature. Ida had never seen her go out on dates with boys. The decor of the bar was unusual, and imbued with a decadent air. The walls were hung all over with the bones of strange animals. Solemn classical music played on a record player. It wasn’t very clean in the dining room, the dust seemed to get on everything. People coming in sneezed repeatedly at first. Yet this gray, fog-covered, dark environment had a special atmosphere, so over many years the family had kept up a good volume of business.

Starting yesterday, Ida was staying next door to the owner’s daughter’s room. Her room was on the second floor, down a long corridor crammed with ancient, dusty furniture. Little white mice scampered in and out of the furniture. It was said that the owner’s wife raised them there. Every time Ida went upstairs the mice scurried in front of her feet, so she always took great care where she stepped. Each morning, when she was still in her room sleeping, slight sounds from the room next door would awaken her. It sounded like someone jumping from a high place, a moment would pass, then tong, coming down with a thump. One day Ida truly could not stand it. She got up, rubbing her eyes, and went next door to see. The young girl’s door was wide open. The room was filled with mice, at least a hundred of them. She was sitting on a table.

“I jump down from the table, to train them in how to quickly flee for their lives,” the girl said.

She stood on the tabletop again. The mice waiting on the ground had a look of alert terror. Ida saw they were all shaking with fear. The girl jumped like a diver, then dropped down. In a blink of an eye the mice scurried to the foot of the wall, quivering at the loud sound.

“My father hasn’t told you my name yet. I’m Jade.”

Her face reddened, and she knelt on the floor to kiss the frightened mice. Ida turned her head and saw Jade’s mother, full of smiles for her daughter, holding a mouse in each of her hands.

“My husband talks on and on every day about returning to his hometown. My daughter and I can only make preparations. It’s so strange that Ida really comes from that place we long for from dawn to dusk. Do you still remember things from when you were a child?”

When she spoke her eyes opened wide. Ida saw in them an infinite loneliness.

“When I was small, and thought every day about fleeing from the mudslides when they came, it was the same as with these mice. A moment ago I saw Jade’s demonstration and felt as if I was returning to my hometown.”

Mother and daughter hurried downstairs because the owner was calling them from below. Ida returned to her room, thinking she would go back to sleep. But once she shut her eyes she saw the mudslide, her body suspended in the air the whole time. So she sat up, and looking out the window she saw the tranquil, empty street. Ida reflected on how, even when staying in this dead corner of the city, she often felt an impulse to slink around the neighborhood like a snake. Especially at night, when those whispering customers arrived in twos and threes. There was a customer who was the owner’s friend. He very seldom drank, but when his girlfriend drank beside him, he watched her admiringly, urging her to drink a little more. The girlfriend’s face was often flushed. She would point into her glass, to make him look inside. At this, he would lean forward and earnestly look back and forth and all over the glass. This man was very much like a man from her hometown who grew vegetables and lived beside the rainforest. Perhaps it really was that vegetable farmer, although he appeared to be too young.

Ida thought, sentimentally, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches. If she were back on the plantation now, she would be busy at work among the rubber trees. For a long time she’d watched as Mr. Reagan enlarged his territory before her eyes, and for no reason she’d grown indignant. She thought he was a tyrant who would make everything disappear into nothingness. At night, among the mists, when the feeble moonlight did its best to struggle through the layers of cloud, Ida felt a desire for Mr. Reagan, perhaps even love. They were tangled together, and she was willing to disappear into nothingness, to disappear into nothingness together with him.

But now she hid in the bar. She thought that Mr. Reagan couldn’t find this place. Making her way through the whispering customers, Ida would hallucinate just as if it were the plantation’s unsteady land under her feet. “Ida!” the owner was calling her, because a group of people was coming in the door.

This crowd of customers held straw hats in their hands. Their bodies smelled of seawater and the sun. None of them spoke. One after another they silently sat down at the bar, then began to drink glass after glass. Ida was greatly surprised to see that one of the women was a neighbor from her lodging on the plantation.

“Can it be? Can he find any place?” Ida said to this customer.

“Yes, it is fate.”

She saw Jade standing opposite, her face pale and expressionless. She might have been listening to the music. Her mother was a little farther away, with her face also turned in this direction. Mother and daughter were both wearing white jackets that were not at all in keeping with the old, dust-covered, decadent ambiance. Did they notice these “hunters”? Or grow uneasy at their arrival? Why did the mother have such a joyous expression on her face? For the first time in many days, Ida smelled the flavor of sunshine. Unable to control her emotion, she took a few deep breaths. As she inhaled deeply, she caught sight of that woman, her neighbor, smiling. Ida’s face instantly reddened.

Jade and her mother both walked off, but they didn’t go very far. At the end of the hall, at the stairwell, they glanced in Ida’s direction.

Ida walked through the back door and stood in the small courtyard. A single raindrop fell on her forehead. Lowering her head, she saw the cobblestones also leaping with mice. The bar was set near the outskirts of the city, so the customers must have walked a long way to get here. Ida, imagining them hurrying along the road at night, imagining them harboring a thirst in their hearts, could not help being touched. She suddenly thought that if there had been a bar like this when the mudslides came, maybe people wouldn’t have fled. Her hometown had teemed with mud frogs, and the walls of this bar were hung full of mud frog specimens. In the bar surely people wouldn’t hear the rumbling of the mudslide outside, since they were only accustomed to listening to things inside. When the mudslides came, they would be chatting wisely in twos and threes at separate tables.

“Ida.”

It was Jade. Two more raindrops fell on Ida’s face.

“Ida,” she said again.

“Oh, Jade. How are you feeling today?”

“I feel like I want to find a dark hole and go squat inside it to think things over. There are many dark holes in our bar, you slowly come to realize.”

The young girl’s face couldn’t be seen clearly in the dimness. Her hoarse voice had a weathered tone. Ida remembered her astonishing beauty.

“Do you have a lover?” Ida asked.

“I do. But we meet very seldom, because I can’t go outside. Oh, I haven’t gone outside in over two years. He’s my schoolmate. At nightfall he stands on the street waiting for me to come out, but I don’t want to go. I’d rather get things done around the restaurant. That doesn’t mean I’m not stuck on thinking about him. It’s because I know that once I leave Green Jade disillusion will overwhelm me. I help out Father in the shop, thinking in my heart that someone is outside waiting for me. I almost hear the sound of his pacing, it does me such good. If I want to clear the thoughts in my head, I just find a dark hole to get into.”

Ida reached out a hand, and held the young woman’s ice-cold hand tightly. She felt sorry for Jade.

“And yet my lover became my foe,” Ida said.

“It’s so strange, I can’t think of how that could be.”

“That — that is to become a single body with someone, but also to become enemies with him. Even when I stand here, I can still see the crows on the farm spreading over the sky and covering the earth.”

Jade’s hand on Ida’s large hand gradually grew warm again. Ida’s heart rushed with the desire to kiss her.

“Jade! Ida!” It was the bar’s owner calling.

Ida thought, her mood complicated, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches. She heard a constrained disturbance among the customers. Here and there were the sounds of stifled cries. Even though she made no effort to look, she still saw white mice scurrying madly among the customers. There really were too many of them. A boy came crashing and tumbling over and grabbed hold of her hand, then pounced into her arms, making a slight rustling sound with his trembling. The boy appeared to be younger than twenty. “They’re coming again. How can this be? Oh? How can it?” he said. Ida remembered that she had just seen him talking to an older lady with an elegant manner, his eyes showing a maturity exceeding his years. “They call you Ida, are you really Ida? Damn it, they’re scurrying over here again. You know how to cope with them.”

Ida helped him into a chair, using her body to block the lamplight so he was left in total darkness. She felt as if this boy were her little brother.

“Whose child are you?” she asked him warmly.

He drew both his legs all the way into the chair, and held his knees with his hands.

“If you leave me, I will never get up from this chair. Tonight there’s a rainstorm.”

Although people panicked, no one had fled. They formed a line standing next to the wall now, staring fixedly at the little animals running along the floor. Ida thought that they were in fact enjoying these little animals.

Jade walked over from the distant end of the hall, with a gait that looked like she was drunk. Ida had never seen her like this and couldn’t help feeling curious. The boy took one look at her and tugged nervously at Ida’s hem, saying over and over: “Her! She’s coming! You have to hide me! She’s coming!” He hid his head in his knee. But it was Jade who stopped her steps in the center of the hall, staring blankly at the animal specimens on the wall. A beam of green light seemed to cut off the other half of her face. In the blink of an eye, Ida understood the relationship between these two people.

When the music stopped, the mice were no longer to be seen. The entire hall became as still as death. At some point, people had taken their places. Perhaps it was the bar owner who’d stopped the music. Now, over by the counter, she could no longer see the figures of the owner and the two waiters; there was a patch of dark. Where had they gone to? Ida looked again, and saw that Jade wasn’t there either. After a bit, the room resumed its earlier scene of low whispering. But the whole time, the boy stayed in his chair. He grasped a corner of Ida’s clothing in his hand.

Ida stood there awkwardly. Past events were before her eyes, an acute struggle in her heart.

Mr. Reagan had once poked fun at her: “Everywhere is your domain. Wherever you go, you make that place your home.”

She had retorted: “I want to be free and unrestrained. I imagine drifting like a kite with the string broken off.”

Someone reached out a hand from the dark and dragged her over, pulling her straight to the back door. It was Jade. Ida had realized this from the start.

“Don’t pay attention to him. He’ll bring you with him into an abyss. The boy has no taboos. He’s not used to what our bar is like, his situation is miserable.”

Jade’s pale fingers fearfully twisted her brown hair.

When the mice were no longer making a disturbance and her father and mother went outside, Jade stood beside the ancient furniture covered in thick dust and told Ida of the hopeless love affair. It was Jade herself who’d pursued this Japanese boy. The boy liked to climb mountains. In the early days of their association, Jade had sensed dimly that his weak, brittle exterior was only a kind of disguise, that inside it was some wild thing, a thing that Jade feared from the bottom of her heart. At that time they were as inseparable as a body and its shadow. Finally, one day the boy invited Jade to climb a nearby mountain with him. The mountain wasn’t very high. It was a bald rocky peak. Although Jade made ample preparations, she never imagined that midway up it would begin to rain. They lay prone on a steep, slippery cliff. The rain fell harder and harder. He entreated her not to look down, because “you would be able to see right through me.” This sentence induced in Jade a desire like a reptile ready to strike. The seduction was too great for her. The result was that she fell into a stone cave grown thick with cogon grass and damaged her spine. During the half year Jade spent in the hospital, she felt that all her hopes were dashed, as though she had died. The boy also went missing. When youth at last triumphed over the spirit of death, when her physical strength was little by little recovered, Jade saw what she had seen that day looking down from the mountain. It was a mouse swimming along a current in midair. Jade regained her normal life, and the boy reappeared. She made up her mind to open up a distance between them, and to raise little white mice with her mother. Her mother, it seemed, grew ever more fascinated with raising mice, so within a short time their corridors were full of the little animals. But the boy didn’t want to have a distance opened up between him and Jade. He knew perfectly well that Jade wouldn’t leave the house, but he still went to wait for her every day at the old place. Sometimes, like yesterday, he burst headlong into the bar.

“The most frightening thing is the thing we most want to experience,” Ida spoke with deep sympathy. “Your boy has a tenacious will.”

“I know,” Jade said distractedly. She kept looking toward the stairwell, seeming afraid her mother would appear there without warning.

“What are you afraid of?”

“My mother doesn’t approve of my sentimental side. She thinks I should concentrate all my attention on handling these mice. Of course, she is right.”

Days passed quickly at the bar. Although almost every day had the same substance, Ida still hoped to prolong each one as much as possible. When she had free time, she thought, harboring an infinite longing, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches, but what were things like in the south on that rubber tree plantation? Every day when the business of the bar began at midnight, when the guests came in one after another like shadows, Ida would hallucinate, thinking she was working as before on the rubber tree farm, and that these customers were her co-workers in disguise. Why did the bar owner always put on solemn, abstruse classical music? Could Mr. Reagan already be here, mixed in among the guests? Perhaps it was because of her longing that the days went so quickly, she thought. Escaping her own lover was a good thing. Hadn’t Jade escaped hers? Before, Ida had never known there was a kind of longing like this: longing for the thing or person one absolutely needed to escape. This new form of longing, while unable to bring her fulfillment, could fill out and enrich every day. Look, Jade was even more fulfilled.

Jade’s mother was looking around at the end of the passage. She saw that her daughter’s door was closed, and tiptoed over. Ida watched her place the object she was holding in her hand on the ground. It was a little white mouse.

“Ida, Ida, do you think Jade is happy?” she asked anxiously.

Ida saw the falling dust all over the woman’s clothes, and her hair was a mess, but this could not conceal her innate beauty. That beauty was a bit like the green beauty of a newborn plant, quiet and noiseless, but astonishing. Ida avoided her ardent glance and answered indifferently: “I suppose she is happy. Every day she looks forward to the next, doesn’t she? Her mother is truly daring. Who else is brave enough to raise so many little mice? This really is something like a dream becoming a reality.”

The woman smiled, as if freed from a mass of worries. She reached out a fair hand and stroked the old pieces of furniture. It seemed they were like her infants.

“These were purchased at a secondhand store. Her father is set on believing that the furniture belonged to his former family, and was scattered after the mudslide. But I have two friends who happened to come upstairs to look at them, and they said these were their family’s old things. What do you think, what is this memory then, after all?”

“Memory is the things people think up.” Ida spoke too freely.

The woman looked at Ida with some surprise. She walked past and began to lightly knock on her daughter’s door.

Ida thought it inappropriate to stand there, and went downstairs.

The bar owner was not downstairs. Someone else sat behind the bar counter, a waiter with an almost fierce expression. Ida had never understood why the owner had recruited someone who looked like this to work at the counter.

This waiter, Mark, was fiddling with the worn-out record player. It was playing the same music Ida had listened to every day until it became familiar. But under Mark’s hands the music became, at intermittent moments, strange sounding, and hearing it Ida’s whole body broke out in goose bumps. She swiftly turned to go outside, but tripped over something. Lowering her head she saw that it was the bar owner. He was lying on the ground reading a book. From his appearance he seemed to focus his entire attention on it, and was undisturbed by the outer world. Because the light in the room was dim, Ida could not tell what book it was. Alvin sat up and asked Ida benignly, “Ida, do you still remember what it looked like at the very last moment right before the floodwater swallowed your home?”

“I’ve completely forgotten. It was chaotic then.”

“All those things are written inside this book.” With both hands he hugged the book, which was as thick as a brick, to his chest. “Only it doesn’t say them openly. They are riddles, which I have to guess. That’s what this sort of book is like. I carried several books here from my hometown. When there’s nothing to do I lie on the floor and read. Why do I lie on the floor? For convenience’ sake. I only need to place my ear against the floor and the things described in the book make all sorts of sounds. I call this ‘listening to books.’”

“Could I listen to books?” Ida asked.

“You couldn’t, Jade can’t either, but Jade’s mother can. This kind of thing requires reading experience. And there’s that fellow Mark, he can, too. Look, isn’t he lying on the floor? He’s listening to music. What he hears and what you hear are completely different.”

Ida walked over to the counter and looked behind it. She saw Mark’s body curled up in a ball on the floor. He was crying.

“Mark is our restaurant’s treasure. The customers say his entire body is musical.”

Ida walked out the main door and stood under the Green Jade grape trellis, her whole body bathed in its light.

“Ida!” Jade called from the window of her bedroom, with tears in her voice. One of her hands caught at the clothes at her chest, and her eyes bulged with fear.

“Jade! Jade!” Ida waved toward the second floor. She remembered that Jade’s mother was inside the building.

What was Jade’s mother doing inside? Intimidating her daughter? It seemed the woman was always stealthily forcing her daughter to do something.

Jade’s whole upper body extended from the window, as though she were going to jump from it. Once and then again she rushed toward the outside, but she could not get through. Ida understood that it was her mother pulling her back. Ida wondered, since it was like this, why did the mother continue to force her? Perhaps it was because mother and daughter were naturally too beautiful. Overly beautiful people often prefer an extreme sort of life. Something was thrown from the window. Oh, it was a little mouse!

“Ida, good-bye!” Jade shouted, her voice hoarse from the effort, and then drew back in. Immediately someone closed the window.

Ida looked up at the spot in confusion. Why was Jade saying good-bye?

But Jade had not gone anywhere. When night came, she appeared with her mother again at the bar. Mother and daughter looked serious, even somewhat desolate. But the owner was dressed in formal wear, with a bowtie, and beaming with high spirits. Who would have thought he bent to the ground to listen to books?

In the main hall, from a dim corner, came a voice that made Ida’s heart leap and her flesh twitch. It was Reagan, Reagan was calling her; Ida heard him clearly.

“I’d like a brandy,” said the stranger, who was sitting with a companion.

The world, after all, could have voices as similar as this.

“Miss, please look over to the right.” He spoke again.

Ida saw a mouse on the wall. It squatted, gnawing, on the head of a deer. The sound of its tiny teeth scraping the bone was clear and piercing. Ida stared, the menus in her hand falling to the ground. She thought distinctly that she had seen this sight somewhere before, many years ago, with rain and seawater. It also had something to do with a strange man. But it wasn’t the man in front of her. This man’s voice sounded near to her ear: “Manila, Manila, floodwaters cover the open fields.” She turned, but the two men at the table were no longer to be seen.

Jade came to her side and, leaning toward her, spoke: “Now we both have fallen into a cavern. Such an exciting night. Haven’t you been out to see the sky? Right now the sky is purple and red.”

Jade finished speaking and bent down, picked up the menus and handed them to Ida, then went to wait on guests. Ida observed in her movements as before a kind of bodily longing, just like the snakes in the wild. Where had her guests gone? There really was not the slightest trace left behind. Ida’s heart shrank a little in pain. She thought, once again, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches, and perhaps because of this he sent his voice to cover the whole earth. The earth, after all, held a man this infatuated.

She attended to many guests. They all wore numb expressions, with a look of pretending to listen to the music. There was a woman whose jacket button unexpectedly fell off. She bent down to feel along the ground, filling her whole hand with dust. The man who’d come with her also helped her look. He shone a flashlight underneath the table for a long while, so long it seemed undignified. Now the guests close by all walked over to look, surrounding them in a semicircle. The man started crawling on the ground like a cat. He crawled through the empty spaces between the tables, with people giving way in turns.

“A dropped button amounts to upsetting the whole arrangement.”

A woman wearing a dark-red coat said this in a low voice. Ida observed her excited eyes gleaming.

Ida was not herself. Wanting to avoid these people, she gathered the plates from a table and went into the kitchen. The cook at first was busy in front of the flame. When she heard Ida enter, she stopped the work in hand and turned around to face her. There was a buzzing weng in Ida’s brain. Was this Ali?

“I didn’t know you were here, that you worked here,” she said, stammering.

“Are you new here? I heard there was a new person who’d come, but I hadn’t met her. So it’s you! It’s good that you’ve come, though the work here isn’t easy to get used to.”

Ida was relieved. It wasn’t Ali. She only resembled her a great deal.

“Oh, I made a mistake. But have you worked in a place like that before?”

“Are you talking about the rubber tree plantation? Of course, fat people like me have all worked in that kind of place. The scorching climate was unbearable for me. Besides, I thought there were too many snakes. They even got into the refrigerators. I would rather be here, missing that place, than stay there myself. I left ten years ago.”

She guardedly looked toward the kitchen door, then walked over, closed it tightly, turned back and sat on a small wooden stool to peel potatoes. After a bit someone knocked at the door. She pursed her lips at Ida, saying: “Don’t pay attention, it’s the bar owner wanting to come in. Once he comes in he adds salt to the meat pies, he says it’s to test the customers’ sensitivity. He’s really insane. I think his opening this bar was an insane gesture, don’t you, Ida?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure.” Ida listened to the owner’s anxious yells.

“Lunatic, a complete lunatic! He wants to go back to that army camp!” The cook turned her fat body around indignantly, and waved a spatula menacingly at the door.

“Army camp?”

“Yes. Couldn’t someone like him only have come from somewhere like that? A well-trained soldier. You haven’t noticed that the atmosphere in this bar is like an army camp? This is a place that levels individuality.”

She put down the spatula and stood there, huffing, clearly not working. Ida thought she was like an angry child. She reminded her of a penguin. In the kitchen, sounds from outside couldn’t be heard, so it was a completely different scene. Someone was poking his head in at the window. It was Jade’s boyfriend. What was he planning to ask about here? He looked extremely haggard standing under the lamp in the yard like a ghost.

“But someone like this boy ought to go to an army camp for training,” the cook said.

Ida finally understood that Mr. Reagan was inescapable. In this unusual bar, far from the farm, Ida’s mood had changed. She didn’t think of returning to the farm at all. The place where she wanted to return was her old home. In her imagination it was a vague shadow. Actually, she didn’t want to take a train there, either. She wanted to take a shortcut, and the shortcut was one of those dark holes in the bar that Jade had told her about.

One day, when music reverberated throughout the bar, Jade guided her into a dark hole. At the time they stood in the backyard talking. There was no rain, intermittent gusts of cool wind blew across the sky, the moonlight appeared clammy. By a pagoda tree someone whistled a hackneyed love song, flirtatiously. Suddenly Jade pressed a hand forcefully on her shoulder. Ida’s feet slid, then she fell with Jade into a hole.

Ah, she was overwhelmed with so many thoughts and feelings! Thunderclaps and the smell of the damp mud immediately surrounded her. The sound of shouts spread out indistinctly from somewhere. They were all familiar voices. Jade was not in the same hole as she, but in one next to her. When Ida called, she made a muddled echo, as if she were almost asleep. Surely Ida stood on the mud of her hometown. That softness could not be forgotten in a lifetime. The rain carried a thick fish smell, and it fell without stopping. Soon her hair was wet through. By her ear, a man from her hometown said: “Manila, Manila, floodwaters cover the open fields.” She remembered that she’d recently heard someone speak this same sentence. At this moment, she deeply sensed that the people of her hometown had an instinct for quick adaptation. Otherwise, in a place constantly assaulted by mountain floods, how could a race survive? Those people taking the night road, how forceful their steps were, with almost every step holding tight to the pulse of the land.

“Ida, Ida, have you seen the burning clouds of sunrise?” Jade mumbled in a low voice off to the side.

The music swelled, and the smell of the tropical rainforest grew thin. But a rooster still crowed at the light, starting and stopping, crowing and crowing.

Jade’s hard, nervous fingers hooked Ida’s fingers. They stood shoulder to shoulder. A man and woman, both drunk, supported each other home. Jade said that they had a long journey to make.

“They are returning to a house with a dungeon,” Jade told her.

“But my dungeon has no boundaries,” Ida said, disheartened.

Jade stifled a laugh. Ida had seldom heard her laugh in this elated way.

“Has your boyfriend come?” Ida asked.

“I can wait somewhere like this, and hear his footsteps traveling far from his hometown. This feeling is always so beautiful. I hear the sound of his instincts.”

Ida thought she would go back to the farm tomorrow. There should be many holes like this there, too. She had completely mistaken them before.

Ida moaned. “My foot!” she said. Her foot was still stuck in the mud of her hometown. It was difficult to extract. Jade turned to look at her, and said it would be best to get used to it. She also said anything could be gotten used to. The door opened and Ida saw the bar owner hiding in the shadows. He lay under a table reading a book. It was very difficult to believe he could see anything clearly in such a dark place. Did the two drunken customers leaning on the table know that Alvin was underneath them?

“Jade, I really admire your father.”

“So do I. You should know that the whole bar is his dungeon. Sometimes I think that I’m ridiculous compared to him! The best I can do is not leave my bedroom to go outside.”

She circled around the counter and went to find Mark. Ida bent down to speak to the owner. He opened his mouth, but his gaze didn’t move from his book.

“I’ve read this story for decades. Everything in the story is a trick. Ida, have you made up your mind to go back? Tomorrow’s train leaves at nine in the morning.”

“How do you know I am going?”

“All things are written in this book. After you leave, you will not be able to find this bar again.”

“Why not?”

“You bolted into it by chance. It’s not easy to find, and if you don’t pay attention then you miss it.”

The owner placed the book like a pillow under his head, coiled his body, and appeared to be sleeping.

Jade and Mark stood dumbly under the lamplight of the counter. The record player was already mute. Almost everyone was drunk. A few people got up to leave, another few leaned on the bar top and tables fast asleep. Ida watched to see who woke up and then immediately she would run over, taking them by the arm to walk them outside. The people she led by the arm were often extremely grateful, calling Ida, “good little girl,” “little angel,” and so on. The look of affected seriousness when they’d entered the bar had disappeared, without leaving a shadow or trace. A woman staggered out the door, then suddenly turned around and called to Ida:

“Tonight we were lucky to meet, in days to come we will not forget each other. Good-bye!”

“Good-bye,” Ida said mechanically. She hadn’t even seen the woman’s face clearly.

At dawn, Ida saw many gorgeous butterflies in her bedroom. They flew up and down in the lamplight and lined up to form letters. Watching them dully, Ida began to weep. At the same moment, she heard Jade in the neighboring room jump down from the table.

Ida left the Green Jade bar. When she turned back to look, the flickering neon light had receded into the distant end of the road.