“Can I help you?”
“The night is vast, I will fall into the tiger’s mouth. No one can help me.” The beautiful woman showed her teeth savagely.
“Oh! Oh!” Joe groaned as he walked, cold sweat running down his back.
“Don’t come back again!” the beautiful woman screamed.
When Joe entered his office he saw the wasps. An enormous wasps’ nest was tied to the air conditioner, where they massed into squeezed, black piles. But these little insects didn’t make any sound at all, which was unusual. Joe opened a drawer, took out a Tibetan travel book, which he hadn’t seen for ages, and turned to the middle. He couldn’t read a single one of the Tibetan words, nor did the book have any pictures, but over a long period of time he had turned its pages one by one. What was inside this book? He didn’t know. He only knew that perhaps inside there was a world, an unfathomed place. As he fixed his eyes on the Tibetan script, a wasp dropped onto the surface of the page. The Tibetan words suddenly leapt up like flames burning the little insect. It struggled for a few minutes and then didn’t move.
“Joe, are you making an experiment?”
Lisa entered. She was still dressed gaudily. Her skirt even showed a stretch of thigh.
Even though Joe turned his face to the wasps’ nest in embarrassment, Lisa walked over indifferently, lifting Joe’s book, spreading its pages with a few shakes. Joe saw a layer of dead wasps lying on the floor.
“My old home was called the village of wasps. Every person’s blood is permeated with their toxin. Vincent doesn’t believe this, and so he suffered enormous hurt.”
“Then what is inside my book? Do you know?”
“It’s a place where you haven’t been.”
Lisa stepped underneath the air conditioner and put a hand in among the wasps. Joe saw her slender hand rapidly swelling. She laughed naughtily. Then she pulled back her hand, her fingers swollen like carrots. Walking away from Joe with a smile, she left.
He had just put the book back into the drawer when a customer entered. He was unannounced. Joe, furious, glared at him without saying a word. He was a skinny fellow with scars on his face. He said that when he came into the room he felt like he was returning home. Who still raised wasps in their offices today? Such a lovely idea. He praised this idea with his teeth bared while pulling a glass bottle from his pocket. It was full of dead wasps.
“Joe, I am a worker from Reagan’s farm.” As he spoke he wiped away tears with the back of his hand, because his left eye always ran. “The work clothes your company manufactures brought about the deaths of two more people yesterday.”
“That has nothing to do with our company.” Joe spoke coldly.
“Really?” He stepped closer, staring at Joe. “Really?” He also swung the bottle in his hand.
Joe discovered that the wasps inside the bottle were moving.
“I will make a business trip to your farm, to investigate the deaths of these workers.”
The thin man looked at Joe curiously, rubbing his eye, and asked him whether he sincerely wanted to understand this matter. Would he be paralyzed with fear by the reality of the situation? He also said that if Joe wanted to go, he didn’t need to go to the farm. He should go to Country C instead. Why should he go to Country C? Joe asked. The thin man became immediately active, walking back and forth across the office and jumping to pluck at the nest so that the wasps flew around, filling the room.
“Country C is the place where you should go. The boys we lost came from there. Two beautiful boys. Your clothing wrapped around them like snakes. But I must leave. Go there yourself, but don’t go to the wrong place. If you see grapevines, you should stop and wait.”
After he’d left, Joe spread out the Tibetan book on his desk again. He thought that the book should have a topographic map and an itinerary inside. Could those two boys have come from the snow-peaked mountains of the plateaus? Joe had one reverie after another, he couldn’t help himself.
Two drenched black birds stopped on the windowsill. They were crows. Joe sensed the air of death. How could he get to Country C? He would take a plane, of course. But how would he tell Vincent? Say he was going to realize his aspirations? Say he would never turn back? Joe felt that web appear again at last. The broad road into his square led all the way to the horizon, and a woman wearing a kimono walked slowly ahead. Was he struggling out of chaos? Or would he jump into an even larger web of chaos? It seemed everyone was inciting him, forcing him to leave. Yet at the very beginning this plan had come from the boss who couldn’t do without him. It seemed that Vincent, too, was forcing him.
Vincent hadn’t shown his face. Joe searched for him in all corners of the office. He hadn’t come, no one had seen him. Joe’s co-workers stared at him in reproach, thinking he shouldn’t search for his boss so anxiously. Someone even hinted he might pay attention to his own business. Unbelievably, everyone knew what was on his mind. Joe didn’t dare keep on asking. He returned to his office like a stray dog, put his things into his briefcase, then sat down to make a phone call to the airport. He had just finished the call when Lisa slipped back into the room like a ghost.
“You’re just going to leave without giving notice?”
“I couldn’t find Vincent.”
“He wouldn’t be here, especially on a day like this. Look at those two crows, so black. That year I came from the gambling city all alone in the world. . You have such good fortune, Joe, you possess everything!” She spread her arms in exaggeration, as if she would dance.
“Actually I have no place to even set my foot. .” Joe grumbled and placed the Tibetan travel book in his bag. He remembered that he still needed to go home and pick up his clothes. What was he doing, was he possessed, that he’d obey a complete stranger’s suggestion? Just because the atmosphere around him incited him to this crazy idea? Who was that thin man, and what made him say Joe should go to Country C, that faraway place not even described in books? Yes, he read many books, but he still had never read a book that described this faraway nation. In books he’d read of red palace walls and amber tiles, but he hadn’t thought about Country C. Joe often traveled on business, for the most part to domestic locations, and sometimes also to Europe and to Mediterranean countries, but Country C, an ancient Eastern country, remained only a hazy recollection in a recess of his mind. He had a groundless intuition: perhaps what Maria had woven was that place? Perhaps he was also on a road with her, depicting those patterns that couldn’t be seen? “Maria, Maria, you are so callous, you won’t release me,” he said to himself. The sun shone on him through the glass. A wasp flew faltering by, stopped on the back of his hand, and began to sting him. Joe’s mind became a stretch of blank space.
He returned home as if moving in his sleep. Maria wasn’t at home. Daniel had not returned either. Once Joe entered the house voices spoke from inside the walls, a sound both urgent and agitated, as if they were quarreling. He put his ear to the living room wall, but couldn’t tell what the argument was about. He went upstairs to his bedroom and packed his suitcase. When he opened the bedroom curtains, two drenched crows sat on the windowsill! The crows did not turn to look at him. They sat unmoving, like statues. Their bodies were much larger than normal. They appeared to be a special breed of crow. Other than his clothing, what else should he bring? He couldn’t make up his mind because he didn’t know a single thing about that country. He had heard before, unwittingly, some familiar person, whose face he couldn’t even recall now, say that poppies grew everywhere there, and that the men and woman all loved to smoke opium, floating like sleepwalkers in blue smoke. In that place, time could reverse, people could return to their childhoods, collecting a few pieces of testimony from their former lives to bring back. Since he had been inattentive at the time, he couldn’t remember who had said this. He discovered that Maria had left a note on the desk. She said she was going to deliver a tapestry that had been ordered by that driver. He felt no need to leave a few sentences for Maria because she’d wished for him to leave all along. Of course, Joe was slightly jealous — he wasn’t sure of the nature of the relationship between Maria and the handsome driver. But now wasn’t the time to consider the matter.