A Momentary Lapse of Reason - 02
A Novella
2. 按部就班[i]
(àn bù jiù bān)
Step by step she walked along the harbor.[ii] The hot wind blew in from a typhoon somewhere out of sight. Hold your head high.[iii] She saw the glistening lights. Then for a lark, she turned into a teashop. At the front, she ordered a cold drink and slipped along to a table. She was alone drinking a frosty cup of nai-cha reminiscing.[iv] Then she took out a book. A collision occurred just in front of her, but she was engrossed in My System to see the details. Who are you?[v] She was blissfully unaware. She burrowed closer to the English chanting the mantra: “Thou shalt not shilly shally!”[vi] Then the eyes peered over the book. There was the urge to meet the gaze which she finally relented to. A pair of coal-soot eyes stared back. Clearly, he had not shilly shallyed. He leaned over the short table ignoring the hustle-bustle of the outside with its warm wind gently caressing the patrons. Pictures came to break their heart.[vii]
The eyes were black but empty. She remembered that she was to stay in place because empty eyes meant that the brain was not thinking. She called up the conversation with the janitor. “The first thing you do is ask does he notices my mind. If not, he is interested in other things.” She did not do all the other things, but she had an idea. The red light stayed steady from the outside. Wind was blowing.[viii]
“What are you reading.” In Hong Kong dialect. It was the obvious opening.
1 … d6. She responded with the Pirc: “Nimzovich.” In hyper-modern English. She was poor with opening, she had not even read the lines.
He was not deterred: “What’s it about?”
“It is about Western chess.” She did not meet his vapid pools. She beat him, but he was underfunding in the mid-game.
He stared with a shallow emptiness realizing the was no entry for him on any front. “We’ll meet again someday.”[ix] I’m Lucas” She thought: you’re a duface.
She turned the page without comment. Ladro a la sagrestia d'i belli arredi.[x]
He stood up and found the friend he had come in with. She heard them talking to each other: “雞同鴨講”[xi]
She thought: He has that right. She turned another page. She had not meant to be so bad to him – it just came out.[xii]
“捉蟲.”[xiii]
She looked up. There were another pair of eyes there. In a measured tone of voice: “His fault, I never asked him to sit.”
“Maybe it was late at night.[xiv]”
“Or he was a liar and a thief.”[xv]
“May I sit?” He held a boba tea in his hand. The tapioca pearls jostle for space. “Are you from Hong Kong or someplace more exotic like 波霸 Taipei?”[xvi]
She drank her roasted pennyroyal tea with a life inside her.[xvii] There was a moment where she considered. Then a movement where she formed the words. “I guess here is the boat on the river.[xviii] What is you named?”
“I am called Kit. What is your name?”
The rush of decision took her: “You can call me Maggi.” If any sense where it came from it did not show on his face. “So, what do you do?”
“I take pictures on a job. I stole the images. I drowned the sense in odors.[xix]”
“Which job do you by direct opposition commit a sin?”[xx] She held her breath.
“Let me show you.” There was a dance where he partly stood up threatening to disappear into the throng and neon lights. But she could not let him go to disappear without a trace.[xxi] Thus her hand grabbed his hand. It was as if a lock fit the key.
And off into the crowded scamper they went.
They had been walking for a while when she asked: “Where is this job? Or are you taking me someplace else?”
“I will show you.” Here we are now, entertain us.[xxii]
He stopped and picked up his hands. “The neon glow of Hong Kong is fading.”
“What does that have to do with anything? It’s unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused.[xxiii]”
“It is collapsing in on itself.”[xxiv]
The meaning eluded her. He continued: “Corruption takes a toll on everything.”
Around the pair was Salisbury Road a massive center of shopping and commerce and museums – to space, to art, to the agglomeration of ambitious greed that produced the Avenue of the Stars overlooking Victoria Harbor washed against Hong Kong City on the other side. The were a few thickets of trees but it was still a merge of people over ornate midrise buildings with eclectic shops and casual eateries. Roads careening nearly to the harbor. The Peninsula Hong Kong ivory guarded the splay of shopping; its white marble said rich. She had never been in the hotel’s confines. If you had money, you were a guest who felt at home.[xxv]
He started again: “Once, not all that long ago, it was decided to burrow a subway from Kowloon under Victoria.”
“I heard all of this. What’s your part?” Exasperation molded her face.
“I was employed to take pictures.”
“Show me. I need to come to my senses.”[xxvi]
And with that, he took out some glossies. The first few were the area around them, and nothing special, but the third was going down into the bowels of the earth. From the granite floor, she saw steel cables rise from the concrete. Wires everywhere with plastic. Truly, she had never seen the underpinnings of the great metropolis that she had lived her entire life in. She looked at his face and saw the pride in his face.
She exclaimed: “Most people take pictures you find a way to make art with a camera.” She stared at the monumental pillars with their black-and-white interplay. There was an eating in her mind that there was something electric in his gaze that reached out from his fingers and hands. From satin, cases poured in rich profusion.[xxvii]
Again, she said: “What about this corruption?”
“In theory, there were studs that were supposed to go in and be latched.” He then shuffled over a dozen of them. “But they did not do that. And my boss saw the pictures. He realized that something was wrong.” He looked at another one – Jun Chi Fun shi, happy na fu. He was lurking on her strange synthetic perfumes.[xxviii]
“You took the picture.”
“Yes, but my supervisor saw the meaning. Through me the way is to the city dolent; Through me, the way is to eternal dole; Through me, the way among the people lost.”[xxix]
She looked at the pictures again she saw tiny tunnels deep underground. She turned to him. “What are these?” And pointed at the small holes.
“Those go to the Kowloon Walled City. The is no government there.”
“What happened.”
“At midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do.”[xxx]
“I thought it was gone. ”
“In the real world. But it is a crack in the wall.[xxxi]”
Their hands started to grasp again. Quizas, quizas, quizas?[xxxii] Then they threw themselves aside behind the cover.[xxxiii]
[i] Step by Step
[ii] A reference to chapter.
[iii] A reference to Argent, “Hold You Head Up.”
[iv] Or pantyhose tea.
[v] The Who, “Who are you?”
[vi] Nimzovich, My System, 37.
[vii] Reference to Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star”
[viii] Peter Gabriel , “Solsbury Hill”
[ix] Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up In Blue”
[x] Dante, Inferno, 24.138
[xi] “A Chicken Talking To A Duck”
[xii] A reference to Asia, “Heat Of The Moment”
[xiii] 捉蟲入屎忽 – short for “putting worms up your rear end” i.e. unnecessary trouble.
[xiv] Chris de Burgh, “Don't Pay The Ferryman”
[xv] Reference to Nirvana, “Pennyroyal Tea”
[xvi] Boba - 波霸
[xvii] A reference to Nirvana, “Pennyroyal Tea”
[xviii] A reference to Chris de Burgh, “Don't Pay The Ferryman”
[xix] Reference to T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 2.13
[xx] A reference to “per dritta opposizione alcun peccato” – Purgatorio, 22.50.
[xxi] 不翼而飞 bù yì ér
[xxii] Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
[xxiii] T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 2.12
[xxiv] 不攻自破 bù gōng zì pò — collapse of itself
[xxv] 宾至如归 bīn zhì rú guī — guests feel at home
[xxvi] 执迷不悟 zhí mí bù wù — come to their senses
[xxvii] T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 2.9
[xxviii] T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 2.11
[xxix] Longfellow translation of Dante Inferno 3.1 - 3
[xxx] Dylan, “Desolation Row”
[xxxi] Jackie Pullinger, Crack in the Wall
[xxxii] Nat King Cole, “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas”
[xxxiii] Reference to Longfellow translation of Dante 11.6.