A Momentary Lapse of Reason - 18

A Novella

18. 见利忘义[i]

(jiàn lì wàng yì)

They came to the door. A door that in daylight was white, but in nighttime came to many colors.[ii] She put her hand on the door as she had many times before for it was the door to masochistic pleasures demanded by sadistic Oedipal parents. It was the joy of intense proclivity of orgiastic affliction in agony which is different from mere pain in its hallows. A throbbing exertion to sting what aches first in the mind and then in the heart, like a pinprick of vaccination to the plague of adolescing adolescences in full bloom.[iii]

She wanted to push on the door, but his hand stopped it. They looked at each other in the eyes through glaring orange and ultramarine blue that spatter on their faces on the long corridor of oozing white despair. He shushed his dry mouth with his index finger. Then he pulled out a jimmy. Where he got it from, she did not know.

With a long slow thrust and a short vicious yank, it pulled in. He looked up: “Like Dette Davis eyes.”[iv] His smile was goonside lopsided.

“If everybody wants you, why isn’t anybody calling?”[v]

“Because we are always on the run now.”[vi]

This tete-a-tete went away whispering in the night because it was so right that it had to be wrong.[vii]

The door opened wide over the chairs and a bench everything was done tastefully in tapestries and lace, in the lice-infested steam shops over the border in Shenzen. There were drapes over two of the chairs, but the moon shined in making the coverings even wider than before and no one seemed to be here at all. This had to be wrong.

And then both of them realized there was a low deep growling of breathing that came from a throat so much larger than any human possessed. And within the pathos of the breath, both of them felt the slightest urge to intrigue against the other. Each felt it might be possible to awaken the breathing creature and have it attack the other first and use that time to scramble towards the door and out into freedom.

Of course, it was Maggie who realized this was part of the spell that the Dragon cast on them, making them both shrouded like a predator and cunning as prey like a safety dance.[viii] They want to act like an imbecile.[ix] The two mixed up and stirred in a glass of the human mind.

“She is awake and is trying to ensnare us with her prestidigitation.”

Over to her right stood Kit who only nodded and just enough to be visible to her. There was that coming from his hair and a single droplet caressed its way down his cheek.

And then the fire of hell broke loose, and all was a collision of grabbing and tearing, all against the force of gravity which seemed to all in all directions. There was a wide mouth coming at them at all points of the compass. Every one of the eight sides had a talon in it.

In a moment all three were parted and at last, the could see the dragon: it was a collision. A collision between the porcelain vase which showed the regal and noble 虬 with the 魔鬼. The wide grinning mouth with teeth as sharp as knives, the many folded eyes with every one of the colors of sunset, the rippling folds that made the scales march together like 长征 - the long expedition from the Himalayans under Mao. It swirled in the ground at unmethodical points and then rose over to meters and ghastly stared down at them.

“I told you, you would fall short of success.” And the Dragon grinned, she was darkness incarnate.

Furniture was crunched and crushed and scattered and both of the humans were splayed with their feet spread far apart trying to maintain a sense of balance. Their clothes were all disheveled and had thorns in them from the initial battlement. And there was nothing they could do about it.

In Kit’s mind, he was rushing through a period of choices all of them looked to and in the same place: defeat. His knife had never pierced the dragon’s mail, his arms had bounced away as harmlessly as a braided bed. His kicks had careened harmlessly as if they were a pillow bunched into a fight. And thus, he was taking breaths in heaves and still wondering.

But the same was not true of the girl, she put her hands into a pocket and pulled out a pointed piece, slashed at the top by a cattycorner gash – it was a bishop that she had pillaged from the game she was in. She then pulled her arm back and over her head like a pitch in baseball and pulled one leg up as if she had stretched out and was delivering the ball towards an imaginary square.

“Tell me, mother, dear, is this patient White or Black? And I don’t mean the color but the square that it lives on in the game.”

The Dragon merely blinked. “Literally? There is no answer without the board, recall my spell is bound in my hands. Balk logic with acquaintances that you have.”[x] And then again, she muzzled: “You are sensitive about your reputation. There is no answer without the board.”

“You can kneel at the board, [xi] but my bishop is at a higher level, of mirth disappeared and come back as proof.”

The dragon leaned forward with the eyes flaming red. “He must be an oracle.”

“Yes, and that is what he taught me: the Oracle machine where your logic is found incomplete.” And within with that, she threw the Bishop, striking the Dragon between the eyes. And out of the dragon’s head came an aura like the moon just rising, and the dragon’s spell blossomed out in all directions. It was Kit who scooped the Bishop of report it hit the floor and cradled it in his huddle. He turned his back up on the floor for the sparkles of the Dragon burned his flesh.

And then the Dragon was gone.

And in its wake was a ruin.

With the unavoidable moonlight sleeping peacefully.

[i] Treacherous.

[ii] From Tolkien, Lord of the Ring about Saruman.

[iii] Wong Kar Wai, 花樣年華

[iv] Reference to Kim Carnes, “Bette Davis Eyes”

[v] Reference to Laura Branigan, “Gloria”

[vi] Reference to Laura Branigan, “Gloria”

[vii] Reference to Toni Basil, “Mickey”

[viii] Reference to Men Without Hats, “The Safety Dance”

[ix] Reference to Men Without Hats, “The Safety Dance”

[x] Shakespeare, Taming of the Shew 1.1

[xi] Shakespeare, Henry VI 2 4.1