“Yes, well maybe he was a little more verbal than you know,” and of course now, unwittingly, Tapshaw has revealed he’s not really so sure about Wang’s complicity after all. Both men realize this as
tell it was obviously him, I can see it so obviously in a way I couldn’t then
soon as Tapshaw says it but Wang lets it go because it’s a little beside the point, and also because part of him has always suspected the same about the boatman — not that he was part of any plot, which is absurd, but that maybe he wasn’t exactly the idiot savant of the lake he pretended to be. “Are you going to tell me he wasn’t broadcasting those messages?” Tapshaw says.
“I’m telling you,” Wang answers evenly, “they were meaningless,” which to Tapshaw, Wang understands, is the most dangerous prospect of all, the most subversive of all possibilities, the possibility that polemicists and ideologues, political spokesmen and militarists alike reject down to their core, not to mention rationalists: yes, Wang ruefully reminds himself, let’s not forget rationalists. “I’ll tell you what,” he says to the other man. Tapshaw glares up at him from the floor. “I’ll let you go,” Wang nods, “if you can answer one question.”
“I’m not playing your games.”
“Tribulation II, or III?”
“What?”
“Tribulation II or III. That shouldn’t be so hard. Haven’t you been keeping track? Haven’t you been able to tell when one ends and one begins, and then when the next ends and the one after that begins? You answer that and I’ll unlock those cuffs right now.”
Unconsciously Tapshaw begins chewing his lip. Wang can practically see the gears turning in his head.
because I didn’t really know him then, now I can see it’s Kirk with flashes of
“Come on, III or IV? Or, wait a minute, I said II or III didn’t I?” Wang taps the gun on the table next to him. “Well, we’ll throw in IV too. Give you more choices, more chances to get it right.”
Tapshaw exhales. “III.”
“Wrong.”
The other man’s shoulders sink in defeat. A moment of silence passes before Tapshaw finally thinks to ask, “How do you know?”
“Actually,” Wang says, “I don’t. But apparently, neither do you.”
“Then it was a trick question,” Tapshaw says.
“You’re really not getting the gist of this, are you.”
“What do you care about that kid anyway?”
Another trick question, Wang thinks, because he doesn’t know the answer, just as he doesn’t actually know for a fact what the young boatman was involved with or wasn’t, it’s just intuition — a little late in my life for intuition, Wang muses. A little late for instinct. That’s what bondage queens are for, instinct. There’s no mathematics for intuition, even for someone who was a student of mathematics once, but then mathematics isn’t always necessarily the language of reason and sense; you can stick numbers after anything, including a tribulation or two or three, and pretend everything adds up. He doesn’t really know for a fact, moreover, that what he’s told Tapshaw is true, that what the boy was broadcasting those nights from out on Hamblin Island was truly meaningless. The broadcasts didn’t mean anything to Tapshaw or Wang, or maybe even the boy, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t
Bronte in him maybe, as if she was the shadow of his resurrection, or maybe
mean something to someone, or that they didn’t have a meaning no one knows.
And at that point, of course, well then what’s rational and what isn’t? At that point there’s no saying anymore what chaos is, there’s no saying anymore what “meaning” means. At that point. The broadcasts were meaningless, Wang said to Tapshaw, as though that was the rational explanation — which only means sometimes randomness is rational and meaning isn’t. Then you’re lost in the dark heart of god or the void, whichever you’ve decided you believe in: when there are no accidents, is chaos chaos anymore? And if everything is an accident, is order an accident as well? One man stands before a line of tanks. Another crashes an airliner into a building. One ends an Age of Reckoning, the Age of the Sky; the other begins the Age of Chaos, in which the sky melts to earth and becomes a lake. On one or the other or both, those who record the times and those who interpret or use the lessons of what’s recorded — and especially those who love power first and last and only, and use such interpretations to their own ends — will impose a rationale. But ultimately and interiorly, the reasons belong not to those who watch and record and interpret and use, but those who do.
Which isn’t to say that, because the man standing before the tanks and the man crashing the airliner each does so for his own secret reason, they’re the same. It’s not to say there’s no difference between them, or that good and evil aren’t real. To the contrary — thinking about this now, although he doesn’t know it Wang crosses a point of inexorability, on his journey to the center of his life’s enigma — it’s men’s secret reasons that best testify to good and evil, which are as real as love and hate, which in turn are the world’s only incontrovertible things,
he was the manifestation of hers, and I woke then or rather was awakened in a
empirically incalculable as they may be. In his self-loathing there’s part of this proposition even Wang won’t accept yet, even as he now, yes, intuits it: he won’t accept that because he may not have stood before a line of tanks solely for whatever reason the world believes, the act was no less noble, no less heroic. Sometimes an act means something unto itself. Sometimes it has a heroism unto its own. That boy who rowed him in the boat back and forth to the Chateau, well, Wang didn’t even know him; and he’s going to live only long enough to begin to intuit the way a child — above and beyond any other creature or thing — explodes all notions of meaning and rationale, chaos and god, because it’s one’s child who makes such things matter beyond one’s own self. And if Wang can’t really answer the question of why the boy in the boat matters to him, or even if boy matters to him, what does matter is that she had a boy, not my boy no; no not mine, not ours, but one perhaps who could have used a father anyway, if there had been a man around big enough to overcome his pain and pride: so this, Wang thinks, this is for lost sons, and Tapshaw will never understand that.
A sudden dusk descends.
In China they would have found me by now, he thinks to himself sitting at the table; and then, turning to the increasingly frayed ribbon of blue in the sky through his window, rationale fractures to its fundament — and he catches his breath, thunderstruck.