The boats had stopped moving across to Hong Kong; the sea was too rough and the piers reserved for the Rainbow restaurant had emptied out as the late-nighters decamped for the “Lamma Hilton.” I noticed that she didn’t get drunk; glass after glass and the effect upon her was unnoticeable. She didn’t say anything irrelevant. Her mind was perfectly focused. I began to wonder about this composure, this marvelous concentration, her hands laid on the white tablecloth like needles pointing toward invisible things. I noticed the scarf she wore around her neck. It was hiding something. We walked back to the house, a long, blowsy tramp along that roller-coaster path.
“It’s strange,” I said, “how this storm stops and starts. It was so fine during the day—”
“There’s no moon either.”
I put my arm around her, and the thin hip flinched.
In Ko Long we smoked a pipe on the bed and made love. It was slow, glacial in some way, and she was far off in her mind. I kissed the swelling around her neck, which encircled it entirely. She didn’t catch my intrusion quickly enough and she shuddered, as if discovered.
We talked through the night.
“You can’t go back to that life,” she said. “Stay with me. You don’t need money here.”
For how long? I thought.
“You’re a gentle man. You’ve taken the wrong path.”
“It could be.”
“I can see you as you are.”
“But I am as I am,” I said. “I’m what they call a night-walker.”
“Oh, I don’t judge you. I know very well what you are. Just as you know very well what I am. We can’t do anything about it.”
I thought, I don’t want to do anything about it.
I couldn’t change, I admitted. It’d be a waste of time to even try. In the realm of the hungry ghosts, no effort is rewarded.
She nodded at this, and her eyes lowered.
“It’s always too late to change.”
Tears welled into my eyes, and thank God it was dark and she wasn’t curious about them because I would have had no explanation. Sometimes one can feel that one has suddenly lost something that one never had in the first place. It just slips out of the hand and breaks.
On the balcony behind us metal chimes sang in the dark, and the lights of the house near us came on. I could hear everything on the mountainside. She made no sound. She held my wrists and bent over me with her neck arched to one side, but not in avoidance. The intensity inside her was not expressive. It seemed to me — I was trying to see it — that it was coiled into a definite shape, like the metal rings of a spring compressed upon one another and forming a sort of tunnel. It expanded and contracted with small gasps and tensions of the legs, and I didn’t know what it was or why she made love in this way, which was without fluidity or affection or drama. It was as if everything around her was invisible and had no weight. I thought then that it had to be because we didn’t know each other at all, that we had merely been thrown together by chance, and this collision in the dark had its own meaning but it was not a clear one. She leaned back and her hair flew around her for a second, a great fan of scented and varnished fibers. She had the look of a dervish stopping in midspin, her eyes locked. She cried out and a second later there was no trace of that sound whatsoever.
TWELVE
When I woke, she was gone. Though the rain had stopped, the trees by the windows continued to drip like little taps, the eaves as well, and oily puddles had formed on the sills. I looked over at the kitchen and saw a lockbox sitting next to the microwave. She must have had thousands and thousands of dollars in there, and in the end all I needed was enough for the ferry and three hands at the Hong Fak. I could hike down the road to the jetty and take a direct boat to Macau. It was possible. I could take a bit of money and send it back to her. I wouldn’t send it back, of course. Money once taken is sucked down into the maw and never spat back up again. I said it to myself in one nice Cantonese phrase: hou yan wu chi. Dead to shame. I was dead in that sense and it no longer made any difference to me if I went from begging to stealing, it was all the same. It was a question of which one was more effective. There was no one to beg from. Still, I hesitated. Ancient scruples baked in the oven of Western civ.
I opened the box anyway, and sure enough there were thousands of Hong Kong dollars and kwai stuffed into it. It was a small fortune. The accumulated earnings of a couple of years at least. She was getting ready to send it back to the monastery in Sando and make merit. She was, after all, a good Buddhist country girl and she would never spend the money on herself until she had made merit by sending her lucre home. Her instincts were predictable.
I wasn’t hungry until late in the day, and she had still not come home. I sat on the deck and watched the fishing boats parade around the straits. At last I took a few bills from the box and walked down to the restaurants, where the tanks were being shown to a party of German tourists. The owners seemed surprised to see me at such an early hour and they asked me in Cantonese if I wanted my usual table. “I didn’t know I had one,” I said.
“You always sit at table seven,” they said.
I sat at table seven, then. They brought a menu and I asked for slipper lobsters.
“It stopped raining,” I remarked.
The owners of this place were an elderly couple and I had to wonder if we had dined here or somewhere else. When the old bird brought my soy sauce I asked her casually if she had seen my friend, the woman I always ate with. Dao-Ming would have to walk through the restaurants to get to the ferry. She said Dao-Ming went to take the boat early and no one ever saw her. I ate my lobsters slowly. When the old geezer came to ask me how they were, as he always did, I asked him the same question. He seemed slightly insulted by it, as if such things could never be any of his business. Instead, he thought it was more appropriate to ask what I was doing all by myself in the house on the hill. There were no other foreigners living there.
“My wife says you are hiding from the Tong. Silly. I said you were on a fishing trip. Which is it?”
“Hiding from the Tong.”
We laughed.
“I see,” he said. “It won’t do you any good.”
“No, I suppose not.”
He offered me a free glass of brandy.
“The Tong will find you anywhere.”
I wondered if he was pulling my leg, but the more we sipped the brandy the more I understood that this was not the case. He thought of me as the loner who came down from the hill for his dinner. It was preposterous. He said he had been anxious for my health. I was looking better, he said, and he supposed it might be something to do with his slipper lobsters.
“My friend introduced me to them,” I said.
“Your friend?”
“Yes, the Chinese girl.”
He laughed, as if without reference to me.
“You found them yourself. You came to the tank and picked them out. You even knew the Cantonese word for them.”
“Me?”
“We were surprised.”
“Every night—”
“My wife said she’d never seen such a lonely man. Every night,” he said sympathetically, “sitting at table seven eating lobsters and talking to yourself. My wife said you were a drunk. Forgive her — she didn’t mean it badly.”
“No, I don’t mind.”
He went off, and I finished the delicate slipper lobsters lying so grandly on their backs. I ate them with my fingers, as Dao-Ming had done, with kale dipped in soy, and soon I was aware of the movement of the sea a few feet below me, its circular motions, and the silhouettes of the hillsides losing their luminous definition and fading. The slowness of this fade was in inverse proportion to the subtle fear that rose inside me, the slowing down of my sense of normality and proportion. I wondered if I had missed the beat of his Chinese. But he had said that his wife thought I was a drunk drying out in a cabin in the woods. I had heard them correctly. The increasing vagueness of the darkness was inside me as well, and Dao-Ming was lost inside it. A brief encounter blown up out of all proportion by timing.