“In fact, it’s the middle of the night,” the servant said lightly. He had also come outside. “Listen, your train is here.”
Vincent heard the sound of a train entering the station.
“So I need to hurry? But I still want to see Lisa’s parents.”
“Don’t worry, the train is stopped at the station waiting for you to make up your mind. But I don’t think you need to see Lisa’s parents. They are still underground, dreaming happy dreams. No need to deprive them of the happiness of their old age. Go see Joyner.”
Vincent thought it was certainly out of envy that the servant didn’t want him to see his father- and mother-in-law. However, now he wanted to see Joyner even more. He imagined the scene of himself and the young woman standing under that beautiful apple tree “spilling words from their hearts,” and he grew a little impatient. And so he took his leave of the servant and the parrot on the servant’s shoulder, and walked to Joyner’s hotel. In the distance the stone mountains had stopped belching smoke and looked solemn in appearance. Before, Lisa had told him, the gambling city was small, only as big as a stone in a slingshot, but the residents had numbered several hundred thousand. The street was so crowded with pedestrians they could all smell each other’s skin. In the casinos people were soaked in sweat. What led to the population’s disappearance and their collective evacuation? What hidden nucleus was everything he saw above-ground and underground revealing to him?
“Joyner, I love you.”
“Vincent, I love you, too. Ten years ago I fell in love with you. On that day you stood at the main gate of the Rose Clothing Company. My mother and I were shopping for clothes in the store opposite, and I took your measure carefully through the glass windows.”
“Nonsense, how old were you then?”
“I was as old then as I am now. You still haven’t realized, time stagnates here. So when I saw you this time, your aged appearance surprised me. That’s why I called you Grandfather.”
They spilled words from their hearts to each other. But the place they were standing was not under the apple tree. It was in a small room in the building where the cleaning tools were kept. The air in the room wasn’t good, with the smoke from the basement seeping through wide cracks in the doors. Vincent choked and coughed. He couldn’t open his eyes. When Joyner gently gripped his hand, an unfamiliar excitement rushed from his heart, a kind of feeling he’d never experienced with a woman’s body, one that eliminated his lust for sex. Was it because Joyner called him Grandfather that his lust for her changed in this way? No, that wasn’t it. The problem was with Joyner’s body. From the start, Vincent had felt that this beautiful woman had nothing directly to do with sex. But how could he not love a woman like her? She was so beautiful and so affectionate.
“Joyner, I don’t want to leave you, but I can’t stand the smoke clouds anymore, I can’t breathe. What should I do? I think if I leave your side now my life will become a stretch of darkness.”
“Oh, no, it won’t be like that. Go, Grandfather. If you leave you can always remember me. Go to where Lisa is, that is your normal life. But my life is also a normal life, don’t you think? The gamblers always lead happy lives. Production and consumption proceed underground, and for many, many years we have been content. Your palms are so hot. That time when I first saw you, I assumed your palms would be hot. You’re a warm-hearted man — how else could my younger sister Lisa fall in love with you?”
Vincent felt dizzy, that he had to go outside or he would fall to the floor. He wanted Joyner to come with him, but she was determined to stay inside the darkened room. He could only go out by himself. He walked into the living room, where there was no smoke, and had a fit of violent coughing. It seemed as though he would cough his organs inside out. When nausea overwhelmed him, nothing remained of his passion. He understood: he could not love within the poisonous smoke. This was why the parrot called him a usurer. How was this underground production and consumption mechanism operated? “Without entering the tiger’s den, you can’t catch the tiger’s cub”—and since he couldn’t breathe within the poisonous smoke, he had no chance of answering this question. Perhaps Lisa had agreed to his coming here in order to make him see where his own limitations lay.
He left Joyner’s hotel, reached the garden at the center of the street, and sat down. Various species of bird drifted in the pure air. The birds weren’t flying in a straight line or spreading open their wings, but were simply floating in the air, as if drifting with a tide, in a curvilinear motion. “The birds of the gambling city,” Vincent sighed. He thought of the damp crows that dropped onto the steps of his house. Just at this moment the train whistle sounded, as if pressing him on. He suddenly remembered he’d left his luggage at Joyner’s hotel, but he decided not to go back. It was better to return home at once.
At the end of the platform he could see the back of a woman wearing a skirt. She looked much like Lisa. He walked over to her, the woman turned around, and it really was Lisa. She was holding a leather suitcase in her hand.
“So you’ve come, too,” Vincent said resentfully.
“Yes, I was just at my parents’ house, in the underground rooms. Are you disappointed by my hometown?”
“No, I love this place.”
“Then let’s go to the underground rooms together.”
“No, I’m not going back to the underground rooms, let’s go back to our home. When night comes, I will search again, with you, and maybe we’ll find the real casinos, the kind with slot machines.”
A dove floated in front of them, followed immediately by a second one, a third, a fourth, peacefully moving past.
“I didn’t think there’d be doves here,” Vincent mumbled to himself.
“When I was little, the travelers who came from outside called this the land of doves. At that time, the entire sky was filled with doves flying back and forth in the rose-colored evening clouds. It’s a pity you haven’t seen this spectacle.”
“So are doves the image of the gambling city’s soul?”
“They probably are. At midnight, a dove sits on the shoulder of every person who comes out of a casino.”
Long after the train started moving, Vincent and Lisa watched the doves outside the rail cars. Vincent couldn’t figure out whether he’d stayed at the gambling city for one day or three because the sun had never set. Judging by his senses, it felt as though more than a day had passed. Yet in this elongated day he had only eaten one meal in Joyner’s underground rooms. Now he understood why the slot machines were hidden in the walls and no longer played — in this region where nothing set apart the day and the night, the stimulation of the slot machines was of no use.
Lisa stared in a daze at the doves outside. Her heart was steeped in a recollection of happiness. Vincent had entered her past life at last. This illustrated the depth of love in their marriage. But her past was not limited to one kind of life, and this was something Vincent probably wasn’t aware of. She had spoken to him of herself before, but what she spoke of was another of her lives. It wasn’t fabricated. But now Vincent might believe that she had invented everything she’d told him before. Thinking this over, she grew faintly uneasy again. She leaned on Vincent’s shoulder, holding his hand, and gently asked:
“Vincent?”
“Oh, Lisa! How could someone like you grow old? I know the mystery of why you are always young — a nightingale sings in your heart. My heart has no nightingale, so I cannot enter those underground rooms. Is that right? What your parrot said was right, I really am a shameless usurer.”
Lisa was reassured. It appeared Vincent didn’t intend to investigate her at all. He still had enough adaptability. He was so adaptable that Lisa still worried about not being able to predict his next step. A long time ago she had jokingly called him “mercury.” The impulse like a riddle in the depths of his heart was, to her, truly like mercury. There would always be a day when, because of this ungraspable poison, she would lose her life.