A Momentary Lapse of Reason - 08
A Novella
8. 垂涎三尺[i]
(chuí xián sān chǐ)
“Where did I stop?”[ii] His voice was contorted into flames of woe.[iii]
“You stop where you started, on the key of nonsense.” She shouted. This was on Nathan Street with everyone looking at us in broad daylight. The clouds had retreated, and the blue sky was weltering in the heat. It was a bright sunny day, for other people.
“Why do you make it so difficult for me?” He was gasping for air though there was plenty to be had.
“Why do you find time to make it so difficult for you?” My face must be burning because I felt the heat from within. Her black-on-white Cheongsam mirrored on the outside. Black and white morality.
Her words were coming out wrong: in the mind, they were ordered such pure digitality, but they came out fuzzy analogesque. And the difference between the two was, as the American humorist Mark Twain wrote, the difference between lightning and lightning bug. two was supposed to capture the grandeur of the first but instead slashed and satire on the first. And unfortunately, the satire was all upon hers. How did we get to this quarrel when all she ever wanted to do was to see him? In her mind, she thought it was proud in trouble:[iv] the urge was to blend with him, but the contrary result was to divide the two apart.
Somehow, they were standing back-to-back and she could see the garden. When she was a child, she would sit on a bench grieving for the girlhood that she would never have. She remembered her head looking down, she remembered the noise coming from every which direction and seeming to come from inside her head as well. She remembered the minute glances that she saw in the corner of her eye. But this was Hong Kong, and everyone minded their own business because like in America the business of Hong Kong was business. And she could see back on the faces that were trying to mind to themselves but could not help but question if that course was always the right one. But then they too put their heads down.
And sell it would ever go. She did not remember the exact moment when the abuse went from merely sitting to something more sexual. But it was early. Five years old, at most. And the welts that grew on her legs, and other points, were it in by an elaborate form of dress. A dress that would hide enough so that no one could admit what they saw.
But then a jolt from the present spun her around and she was looking at Kit’s black eyes. The most important motion was anger, but it was trying to be slid out by compassion. But the compassion was lost.
She stood up and was there as he spun away and left. And there was an emptiness inside that would not be quelled by any amelioration. It stuck like a stone in her throat. And she absently thought about how the Adam’s Apple formed in her opposite numbers throat. She would have to look it up.
She picked a morning fly off her dress and let it drop to be pavement. All the while wondering what they exactly were quarreling about.
Then her logical mind broke down and cried from the inside. She could not take five.[v] The dark hiding in plain sight.
She wandered to the top of the city wondering what it was down there where Kit would spend time with his thoughts. She wondered what those thoughts were and why he could not open himself up to her inquiries and questions. Questions that urged their protrusions into the conscious world to light on feeding the answers with a butterfly wing. That we would conquer even a wall of steel in its complexity in a Mandelbrot-style confusion of 13 digits good,15 digits bad.
She watched along the tight market streets and saw pairs of people clasping hands and wondering if she could be among the happy folk. Because of course, she was not at the moment there. Glancing in her mind were the lips taught for kissing and the kissing that she had denied herself, but she did not know what motivated the rejection. She only held the dejection from its loss. At least she did not cry. On the outside.
But then she was magnetically pulled back to the place it was before. A deep shimmering light.[vi] The light that called her back to a place that she had never been. 1969 called her even though she did not even understand what was important about that year.
Then her wanderings dropped her back to the cold and dark.
And into her parents’ apartment. With cords for the wrist, and belts for the torso. Screaming for anyone in the apartment complex. Though none of them truly cared and the emptiness of the night absorbed worse sounds than that. Bibbling jiggling bouncy cum veracity, asphyxiating on tap out of the faucets, and within every closet there was a new disguise for the agony which was inflicted upon her black hair head. Thighs clench upend the sheets under straps unending sweet pain. She grasped the bed with sullen hands clawing at the wall with fingertips akimbo reaching for the intoxicating pleasure that she horrified felt. This was not freedom but the exact opposite. She hated herself for loving it in the dark patterns of the night.
But there was a rule here, a hidden rule to be sure, but a rule which held her heart and bound her mind in a transaction embrace. She did not know which neurons held her here, but she wished she could rip out them by the roots. Stem them with bodily harm aforethought. And cast them to oblivion to see them sink in the Pacific Ocean. If that was deep enough.
Then she reflected: if the rule ended you up here, what this was the rule?[vii]
[i] Drool with envy
[ii] Amadeus, scene with the Confutatis.
[iii] Reference to Amadeus, scene with the Confutatis.
[iv] Reference to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in the Rabbit Season Trilogy.
[v] David Brubeck, “Take Five”
[vi] The next three sentences are to Eagles, “Hotel California”
[vii] Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men, 2007