I laid myself out on the sand and Solomon lay skeptical beside me. We talked about our fathers, whom neither of us had known very well, and both of them it seemed had been unlucky. Unlucky men breed unlucky men. Solomon seemed undisturbed by anything in life, neither good luck nor bad, not even the bad luck of his father, who had flown planes for Continental and lost all three of his wives to alcoholism. It rolled off Solomon and in the end it was the same. Like America, he said, he would die in a pauper’s grave and he didn’t mind. Someone had to die in paupers’ graves. Just not a pauper’s grave in China, where no one understood the nobility of being a pauper in the first place. His debts had risen to over a million in Hong Kong dollars and his wife had bailed him out and forced him to sign a contract under which he would never gamble again, but of course it had done no good. Addiction is fate. We were the same in that respect, and the unluckiness of my own father seemed reassuring when it was counterweighed by his story. My father, dutiful and doomed till the end, a marcher to other people’s brass tunes who had marched right along into a foolish early grave.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “I am going to play all day at the Venetian and win back the hundred thousand I lost last week. Wait and see.”
It was clear he wanted to go back to the Hyatt party, which would run late, with girls and coke and other amusements, without which, he added, life would be quite unbearable. What he wanted from it I couldn’t say, but I would have to let him go and get whatever it was. The pleasures of life and flesh, the small advantages of the popular man. I couldn’t blame him. We walked back to the hotel. The sound of Riverdance did not calm my anxieties. For a moment I was tempted to try to find the elusive Adrian Lipett again, but I knew in advance now that he would evade me with his customary skill and that I would be made a fool of. I was beginning to feel shabby, a tramp at the feast of others, and as soon as one feels this way one has to beat a retreat into the shadows. I found a cab outside the main door and Solomon embraced me. Was I sure I didn’t want to come in? “To do what,” I asked. “To salivate for the things on the far side of the glass?”
“I see your point,” he laughed.
I was back in Macau within half an hour, and with nothing better to do I decided to go to the movies and think it all over. By dawn I would have a decision, and after that I would sail into nothingness. What was left to me now wasn’t enough to gamble anyway.
EIGHT
I went to a bar near the Landmark, and I set out to get myself into the calm neutrality of total intoxication achieved through Chinese brandy. The bar was called Jilted and there was a kind of shooting range at its far end where patrons could pin up images of their ex-lovers and throw beer glasses at them. A sobbing Russian girl was doing just that. I let the memory of Dao-Ming flood back into me and soon there was very little of that memory. Through the darkened windows the first glimmers of dawn were bouncing off the metallic sides of the streets, off the windows covered with stickers and the shutters of the computer stores, and the stale odor of all the spent nights seeped back into my head and made it ache. I wondered if I should go back to the hotel and get a shot of free vodka from the mini-bar that I hadn’t paid for, and on reflection that seemed like a pretty fine idea since the shots at Jilted were not the cheapest. There was nowhere else to go and I had the wild idea finally that I might collect my things — as if I had things—and then go down to the ferry terminal and cross over to the Hong Kong side. No reason. Just because it was something to do.
When I got back to the Lisboa the receptionists didn’t even look up as I walked in, and I went up to my room unremarked upon. I stayed there for less than five minutes, collecting a few items, such as a wristwatch and a light raincoat, leaving my passport in the desk drawer where it had lain undisturbed for months. I closed the curtains and left the bathroom light on but extinguished the others. I stood for a moment in the center of the room and looked around this ridiculous habitat that I had made my own for so long, wondering if it were even possible now to simply walk out as if it were a stage prop that could be discarded. I turned and decided not to think about it. In my raincoat and suede shoes I went back down to the lobby, hoping I could pass out of the building as anonymously as I had just entered it. And indeed no one noticed me.
I walked to the terminal. A sullen crowd had already gathered for the first boat over and the men were smoking. The skies had grown overcast, and for a while it looked as if there might be a last-minute decision about whether to let the hydrofoil out into open sea. On the horizon the monsoons hovered. At six thirty we began to board, and I sat at the front of the craft among the old people wrapped up to the eyeballs as if it were the dead of a European winter, and off we set, the all-night low rollers and a few of the cleaning staff and some confused tourists and Lord Doyle, rocking on ominous swells and swinging into view of the green mountains of the South China Sea, which are always as soft and definite as monuments carved out of jade.
I sat against the window and thought back over the sequences of my losses, struck by a sort of disbelief in them because they went, I thought, against the statistical law of odds. I had been duped, but there was no going back.
Buddhists believe that the afterlife is divided into six realms. There is the realm of devas, or blissful gods; the realm of animals and that of humans; the domain of the asura demi-gods; and of preta, or hungry ghosts. Below them all lies the realm of naraka, or Hell.
Each realm reflects the actions of a previous life. People who are reborn as hungry ghosts were strongly acquisitive, driven by desire. Their insatiable needs are symbolized by their long necks and swollen bellies. Continually suffering from hunger and thirst, they cannot sate or slake either craving. They are supernatural beings and so their sufferings far exceed our own. Their hunger is a thousand times more intense than ours, and so is their thirst.
For the Chinese the realm of the hungry ghosts is similar to Hell in the Christian world. Its inhabitants have mouths the size of needle eyes, and stomachs as large as caves. Taoists believe that the hungry ghosts did not find in life what they needed to survive. They are the ghosts of suicides and those who have suffered a violent death.
And they are awaiting reincarnation, like everyone else. “The Sutra on the Ghosts Questioning Mu-lien” describes a deceitful diviner being reborn as a hungry ghost for several lifetimes. During the seventh lunar month of the Chinese calendar, the hungry ghosts are let out of Hell and roam freely seeking food and entertainment, and the Hungry Ghost Festival welcomes them. The sacrificial altars house the bodhisattva Ksitigarbha, offering plates of rice flour cakes and peaches, and they say that it is what the hungry ghosts want to eat, as if mortals would know, when in reality they know nothing about the ghosts at all.
I was thinking of all this as I got up and walked to the front door of the hydrofoil and peered out into the rain as the boat listed slightly in the wind and the guards in their waterproof capes strained to catch the first sight of the skyscrapers. The looming crystals of capitalism that fill us with comfort and dread. I edged out onto the rails and slipped back to the rear of the craft, where there was a platform of some kind, and I hung on with wet hands scanning the diminishing mountains of the mainland, on which could be seen groups of white houses and snaking roads and little fields of sunflowers. This land that I always passed and never explored. A distant paradise called “China” that was reputed to be Hell on earth but was probably something in between. If I threw myself into the sea right then, it was possible that my human instinct to survive would impel me to swim there and wash up on a beach, ready to be collected by the Red Army. Or perhaps I would have the inner force to keep myself under water.