“Ida, don’t you like your home to be everywhere and to live out in the open?” Lara asked her.
“I am a wasp, surely you’ve seen how a wasp makes a nest.”
As the walls rose, Reagan looked on from a distance with overwhelming emotions. Ida’s movements were so harmonized, so rich in musicality. She was an innately skilled builder. The original detached wall now became the back wall of her new building. This new building had two rooms, front and back. Lara also took part in the work. She had done carpentry before, and now she was helping Ida make the roof frame, which they prepared to cover with thin strips of Chinese fir.
And so Reagan watched Ida move the cot into the small house she’d built. He knew the crude small building had no electricity or running water, or even a window, and there was only a low wooden door. At midday Jin Xia’s older son, the “wolf child,” always came to the front of the small house and knocked on the door. Ida would make warm welcoming sounds. But the wolf-child never went in. They would chat at the door, and then the wolf-child would bounce away. Reagan took notice of all this. Reagan’s home wasn’t the boat of which he’d spoken. It was an abandoned trailer. Every day Ali brought him simple meals and water.
“Why does Ida want to live in that building?” he asked Jin Xia.
“She wants to become the farm’s witness. The farm is ceaselessly expanding, the borders change and change again, and in her heart she’s uncertain about it.” Jin Xia’s expression revealed satisfaction when he said this.
Reagan saw Jin Xia’s wife holding a basket of clothes as she tottered up and down the stairs. She was going to the backyard to dry the clothes. Her purple swollen feet shuffled. She did not appear to be in a good state of health. Jin Xia went with Reagan to stand under the tree. He smoked one cigarette after another, squinting his long narrow eyes and plotting some affair in his heart. A feeling of uneasiness skimmed across Reagan’s mind as he thought of certain rumors about Jin Xia. “Never mind what they say, this man’s driving ambition isn’t a menace to anyone,” Reagan thought.
Jin Xia’s wife finished drying the clothes in the backyard and came out. When she went up to the house Reagan saw her bare feet running with water, each step a damp print on the stairs.
“Every day my wife and I make up vain dreams inside the house. She tells me our farm could occupy more than half of a country. She wants me to expand into diversified production.”
“I worry about the termites,” Reagan blurted out, then felt a moment of remorse.
A nauseating odor filled the trailer. It smelled like decomposing sea creatures. Reagan didn’t know where it was coming from. He lay on the sofa bed in the dark with his eyes open, waiting for the Eastern woman to arrive. She’d altered her pattern and no longer lay entangled with him. She stood outside the window of the trailer, poking her head in, breathing forcefully, making reveling sounds. So she liked the stench inside the truck. Reagan remembered that the woman walked back and forth under the burning sun all day, coating her clothes with dust, but when she was entangled with him he had never smelled a bad odor on her body. You could say her body had no smell. Even her body’s odor couldn’t be smelled. Then what about her body excited him? When Reagan was with her, he had never managed to attain a clearheaded judgment. Her flesh was like a fish in water, relaxed and smooth, but at the crucial moment it always lacked substance. One time, when Reagan was faint from climax, the woman’s body actually disappeared. His whole body was rapidly dispirited. He felt only dread. Fortunately the situation lasted only a few minutes, then she reappeared. He began that hungry, thirsty lingering with her again. She very seldom spoke, only once, when she told him she came from a small, little-known island in the Pacific called Yellow Fruit Island or some such. Reagan had never heard of this name. At all other times, her speech was just two or three words: “oh my,” “I never thought,” “look,” “love,” “keep on going,” etc., in a thick foreign accent, but Reagan couldn’t guess her meaning. It was as if she were practicing saying these phrases for fun.
“Seabed, seabed!” the woman said to him from the window, blowing out air with her mouth.
“Dear, come here!” Reagan called.
Futile thirsting tormented him. Inside the trailer the evil odor grew thicker. Reagan was astonished: how could a quiet, lithe woman like her enjoy the odor inside? She stopped by as if it were merely the smell which drew her there. An enormous whale skeleton appeared in Reagan’s mind. A few pieces of rotting meat stained the skeleton. A tsunami was pushing this prop, spinning it around.
He sat up with an effort and saw the woman leave the window and walk into a patch of forest that was billowing with smoke.
“Ida.” He strained to say these two syllables then returned to the sofa bed.
The farm’s territory was reaching into the far distance under the cover of darkness. The enormity of its scale drove Reagan mad. Now he entered Jin Xia’s insane path of thought, changing into a crow circling in the sky over the loess, with no way to alight. He meant to set a boundary, but this intention became an obsession over a vain dream. Thirst, hunger, fear — he flew in rings, flew on diagonal paths, then made a spiral descent. He thought that perhaps he had stayed at the same spot and was not really moving around. At one moment he glimpsed a breakwater, and thought mistakenly that it was the border. But it wasn’t a sea beyond the breakwater, it was a field of maize extending beyond the horizon — a test site for launching Jin Xia’s experiments in diversified production.
When the sky was barely light he heard Jin Xia talking to someone. Apparently it was a police officer questioning Jin Xia about the issue of buying land. Jin Xia stuttered and his voice trembled. He would say something and then immediately deny it. Reagan guessed that he was already white in the face, his forehead sweating.
Reagan walked to the window and glanced outside to discover one man there, Jin Xia, standing under the tree and staring into space.
“Jin Xia, who were you just speaking with?”
“Oh, no one. I was talking to myself,” he said awkwardly.
“Talking to yourself? Then why is there a rumor going around saying you take bribes?”
“Mr. Reagan, I tell you, I started the rumor myself.”
“Oh!”
Reagan was greatly surprised and didn’t speak for what seemed like half a day. Crows cawed suddenly in the trees. A whiteness appeared in his brain. In the trailer the stench had disappeared, but his keyed-up nerves still could not relax. What Jin Xia described, too, exceeded Reagan’s anticipation. He thought of the wolf Jin Xia was raising, his house eaten through by termites and half of it in rubble, his wife’s edema dripping water, his older son drifting around like a wild wolf. . Reagan stepped out of the trailer. He wanted to speak with Jin Xia.
“Jin Xia, how many years is it since you came here from your original home?”
“Me? Oh, let me tell you, I don’t have a native home. I was born on the road, and after that I was always on the road, in a troop on the march. . Look at me, do I look like someone who has a native home?”
As he spoke he stared into the distance. Reagan followed the line of his sight and saw a hawk drop slantingly through the air, at first managing to hold itself aloft, then plunging into the lake.
“I have no native home,” he said again. “Your driver Martin knows all about this.”
“Martin?”