The rooms seemed underwater, the smoke static like fish milk suspended in water that isn’t moving. I remembered them from that fateful night. Instinctively, but not knowing quite why, I looked for the table where I had met Dao-Ming. The room was mobbed but I found it easily. It was table number four. As I sat there quietly, unrecognized by the staff, I played a winning hand and thought back to that night, which now seemed like a part of my distant past. I had forgotten how long ago it was. Weeks, months, it was all the same. A girl sitting quietly by a table minding her own business, and now I was playing, so to speak, with her money. Needless to say I had not sent her back the money I had taken, and the more time went by the less likely it was that I would ever do it. I was like that, but I couldn’t help it. I was like the scorpion in Aesop’s fable who stings the animal carrying him across a river. Sorry, I could say (like him), it’s just my nature. I won a hand, scooped up the usual winnings, and then just sat there lost in thought with a glass of naughty lemonade. A man in a white velvet suit was playing opposite me, losing mightily, his face red with rage. His bloodshot eyes filled with tender sadness. Where was Dao-Ming at that very minute? I was sad not to know. Was she in a room plastered with mirrors with her legs wide open and her eyes clenched shut? Was she at home making miso soup on the gas ring?
I got up and walked through the wall of smoke. I could see all the flickering numbers at once now. People losing their life savings with a smoldering fag end in one hand, a plastic cup of punch in the other. Old people who must have lived through the Cultural Revolution and its shrill stupidities, who must have known all about pointless gestures. There they were and they should have known better. They were all losing minute by minute, and around them the electronic boards showed the warp of their bad luck. I wanted to shower them with gold to make them stop. They didn’t know what they were doing. Thirty years of miserable slog and labor tossed down the maw of the casino in seven minutes. It was incredible. I went to a second table, number nine in the room, and won again, inconspicuously, picking up a nice windfall that I used to clean out a third table. I went on and on until I was at the back of the casino and the Greeks were walking about with vodka shots on trays, their crests of horsehair shining under the lamps. Here there were a lot of these old mainlander couples with their blue caps and their nylon jackets. They played with watery eyes, their veins popping out. The true proletariat from the workers’ paradise being milked dry by the capitalists of the new age. They knew it and they enjoyed it, because even being milked dry by the capitalists of the new age was more novel, more amusing than not being milked dry by them. It was freedom, and freedom is supposed to fuck you over.
The last table was number eight in the room (I was keeping track for some reason), and when I had won there I collected my chips and wandered into the next room along. The light from the chandeliers went straight into my brain and I quivered. Then I remembered the number that Dao-Ming had written on my palm and that, despite a few baths, had not washed off. It was still there, as if written in an ink that could bind permanently to human skin. As I read the numbers I began to realize that in some way they corresponded to the numbers of the tables I had been playing at. It did not, of course, seem possible, but I was increasingly sure that it was the case. A sequence of numbers that must be an irregular phone number could not at the same time be a plan of action at the tables, but I thought it all the same, even if I am not one to deny that it might well have been all in my mind, because everything was all in my mind during that time, and I knew it. And since everything was in my mind, everything was equally probable and therefore both possible and credible. I didn’t care if the idea was absurd in the extreme, that for me did not make it untrue. It was a sequence, and I was moving through it.
I stood stock-still in the middle of the floor, and I felt overwhelmed with hunger and confusion. A telephone, I thought, I need to get to a telephone. I went directly out into the vestibule and found one. I called the number in a quiet spot.
I dialed the number on my hand, and I was surprised, hearing the dial tone, that it was a phone number after all. I had nothing prepared to say to her, however. I looked up and saw the clock on the wall, with the two hands aligned on the three. My hands were wet with perspiration and I had to wipe the receiver. At last the dial tone was interrupted and I opened my mouth to speak, to launch into an apology. But no one answered. Instead there was a low susurration at the other end, like white noise, a sound of waves breaking on shingle or flowing in and out of caves. Thinking that it might be a message on voice mail, I waited for three or four minutes, but it continued. The sounds of the sea, continuous and strangely bitter, suggesting the presence of an eternal storm.
I hung up and then, as I was walking back to the tables, I wavered. On a whim, I turned and went back to the telephone and called the number a second time. This time, equally unexpectedly, a voice answered, an irritable old woman.
“Is Dao-Ming there?” I asked in Cantonese.
But they can always tell that you are a gwai lo.
“She’s out having dinner.”
“When will she be back?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Lord Doyle.”
“Do you want to make an appointment?”
It had never occurred to me that I could meet her so easily this way. But of course—
“Why yes, I would. When can I come?”
“Let me look.”
The phone was put down and now I could hear Hong Kong pop droning from a radio set.
When she came back she was curt.
“I have a spot free at six p.m. next Thursday. Can you make that?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be late.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’m writing you in the book. One hour?”
“Two.”
“Ah, much better.” She was suddenly polite. “Thank you, sir, we’ll see you then. It’s ninety-two Queen’s Road East near Pacific Place. Take care la.”
I was so elated that I could only stammer something incoherent. I went back to the tables halfheartedly but then felt enormously hungry and decided instead to dine. I went to Lei Garden and ate urchins and drank rice wine.
As I sat there in that crazy décor with my bag of unused cash I felt bottomless in some way, as if all the urchins I was eating could not fill me. Indeed, I ordered plate after plate and it seemed to make no difference. I was still hungry and ordered more.
As I gorged, I thought of Dao-Ming working from a small room in a tenement on Queen’s, cool and businesslike, laboriously grooming her hair every day, sealing a little cash in an envelope on Friday afternoons and sending it back to her village. She must have paused in front of the mirror and looked hard, perhaps puzzled by what stared back at her, since we have no way of predicting what we will actually become. Time takes us over and does what she wants with us. Even inside our own lives we find ourselves discarded. She pulls a hairbrush through her long mane and criticizes the melodrama of her own mascara. She remembers a boyfriend from long ago, one of the few who mattered, or maybe the only one who did — but they rarely pan out. She wonders where he is now. Married to a proper girl, halfway happy. He will never inquire about her, afraid of the disgrace of finding out where and who she is now. It’s better not to know.
She listens to the romantic songs on her radio, waiting for clients. She has not become cynical in the slightest, she is even-keeled and realistic, and her sadness is also even-keeled and realistic. She has passed the halfway point, the point at which realism outruns hope. Her savings are modest but rational. She walks all the way to Jardine’s Bazaar to eat in the street and she eats alone, among the lovers and the families and the back-slapping businessmen, self-contained and absolutely quiet. She is defeated, but she is not divorced from her pride. She oversalts her food, covers it with hot pepper, and wipes away the tears with paper napkins. She walks through Wan Chai at night with her doggie bag from the restaurant, pausing by the windows of the furniture stores and the pet shops with their cages of brilliantly colored birds. It is not impossible that one day she will own a room that looks like the one re-created in the display, rich with misapplied gold leaf, and that she will fill it with birdcages. One day her luck might turn, as the casinos have taught her.