Reagan really was in the dining room, but at the same time he was upstairs in the bedroom. He was with the black-clad Middle Eastern woman (here she is Middle Eastern) standing in front of the window and observing the movements in the thick grass below. As the woman walked about, her clothing made a sha sha rustle, like the falling of a rain shower. They didn’t speak. For Reagan, it was because he could hear all along the woman’s unceasing speech. He heard all of it, but didn’t understand what he heard.
As Reagan sat down to a meal at the table, he saw them. They’d heard a summoning call and slipped into the dining room, five of them altogether. One was especially impudent, and went so far as to latch onto Reagan’s throat. The black grain on its body matched the pattern on that woman’s skirt. No wonder that when the woman summoned the snake, it came. The egg in Reagan’s mouth proved hard to swallow because the snake had locked on tight. Heavy footsteps upstairs could be heard downstairs. Someone seemed to be taking off into the air. Reagan stood up from the table, then tumbled down. As he tumbled with a muffled peng, the snake wound around his neck released him, and it flew toward the foot of the wall. In a moment it disappeared.
The sound of irregular footsteps came down the stairwell.
“Mr. Reagan fell down.” Martin craned his neck to see inside the dining room.
“Don’t worry about him.” Ali spoke one word at a time.
She was watching the shadow of the black-clad woman in the distance, and she lowered her head as if lost in thought.
“Do you recognize this woman?”
“Why should I recognize her? She isn’t from the farm.”
The two of them watched the snakes gnawing at each other in the thick grass. Martin murmured, “A mess, a mess.” What he thought to himself was, “How can Ali let her employer lie there on the ground? She’s cold-blooded. She could be a poisoner.”
That was when Ali and Martin heard, at the same moment, a voice calling for help. They learned only afterward that two female workers drowned in the bay. One died right away. The thick heavy waterlogged work clothes cost her her life. There was a froth of blood in the nostrils of the dead woman.
Lying on the floor of the dining room, Reagan heard the news of the worker’s death in his dream. He stood in a dark, gloomy attic. Someone entered to report this event to him. He heard the man with a head like a mushroom say that the dead one was Ida, the girl from an island in Southeast Asia. At this Reagan heard thunder outside, then rain struck the leaves of the Chinese banana trees. He wondered: On this farm where there were no high mountains, could there be a sudden, torrential mountain flood? The mushroom-headed man went downstairs. Oddly, though, Reagan didn’t hear the sound of footsteps. There were a few old books in the attic. Reagan casually caught up a small volume with a colorful cover and opened it to its first page, which was printed with an engraving of the owner of the attic — a small portrait of the proprietor. The man’s deep-set gray eyes revealed a deep world-weariness, and his arms were covered with long, thick hair like an animal’s. The owner of the attic had signed an agreement with Reagan so he could stay on Reagan’s farm and build a house there. Reagan remembered that this deal was also struck in a dream. At the time he’d had a vague notion that this man’s building might become his own refuge, and for this reason he agreed to allow him to build a small house on the low hill next to the bay.
When Reagan woke up, Ali had already tidied up the dining room. Reagan asked her about this business with Ida. Ali raised her eyebrows in astonishment, saying, “Ida just came by to borrow a sickle from me.”
“Did someone from the farm fall into the water?”
“The message was a mistake. Rumors are flying everywhere these days.”
The image of Ida carrying a sickle in her hand floated into Reagan’s brain, and his heart palpitated nervously.
“Ali, have I signed a sort of agreement with someone, I mean, an agreement to let a man build a house on the farm? I’m concerned about this.”
“Yes, you have. Do you regret it?”
“Oh, not at all. Doesn’t this kind of life need a force from outside to break through it?”
He glanced toward the window, and saw outside that the sun was still shining brightly. There were several hawks wheeling in the sky. Was it because they’d discovered a corpse? For the first time in his life, he felt that his farm was too large. To oversee it from every angle would be simply impossible. A few years ago he’d bought the bordering farm, connecting it with his own rubber tree plantation to form a single piece of land. It was originally a farm for many kinds of industrial crops, and as soon as he bought it he’d regretted it. From then on, he hadn’t gone once to inspect it. He had handed the entire place over to a manager for supervision. He felt he was already aging. He couldn’t manage as many things. Why did he go on buying land? It seemed as though this decision to purchase would be his lifelong riddle. The hawks flew over from that farm, so they must have heard, too, the news of their new master. Before this they had never flown into his airspace. He knew that at the same time he expanded his territory a kind of expansion was progressing underground. It wasn’t something people knew about. He could sense this expansion that couldn’t be seen; however, it was hard to describe. When he went to the city on business, the feeling of expansion became incredibly intense. On its dark and narrow streets, he walked into a different world. For example, that African woman, the street cleaner, belonged to a different world. Reagan at any rate was unable to understand her kinds of desire and her disdain for him.
“What did Ida borrow a sickle for?”
“She said it was to cut grass. She’s always doing strange things.” Ali sighed.
“Why is Ali sighing?”
“When I think of this child running away from a place like that, it just seems unbelievable. Can you imagine the sight of a rushing mountain flood?”
“I can’t. In a dream I was saying, Fall, fall, let loose the mountain torrents. But here there are only low hills. How could there be a mountain flood? You’d have to ask Ida.”
“Ida forgot about it, a long time ago. There’s no way of remembering an event like that.”
Lisa flew past along the asphalt road. The skirt she wore was already so dirty you couldn’t make out the color. Reagan thought she was running without a goal. Heavy clouds floated on Ali’s face as she silently walked into the kitchen, thinking of the woman’s grievous story.