A Momentary Lapse of Reason - 19
A Novella
19. 流离失所[i]
(liú lí shī suǒ)
It was a treacherous light that came within the walls that contained them, it was peaceful like a tomb and as cold as death. She breathed out and saw a white frost gather.[ii]
“What is to be done?”[iii] It was on a trill this question formed on her lips.
“If it were me, I would shoot myself. On a bridge. At night.”
“Why is that?” Her voice betrayed how dear he was to her.
“You are free now of the dragon that was your mother. And I would be free of the tiger that is why life.”
“Do not say such things, there is too much to do to be drunk like this.”
“I may look young, but I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”[iv] He looked into her eyes and formed a depressing grin. It was madness made flesh.
“Don’t be a coward.”
“I am not, I merely have been transformed. By freeing you from your mother my task is done. It is apropos of the wet snow.”[v]
“You speak like Tal.”
“Perhaps we are part of the same recursion defined.”
Over the lights in green, pink, seacrest, and new clear gold a warm second light tripped the light fantastic from the wasted mirrors of the glob of people moving below, off of the steady rain which pelted the palm trees, off of the lights themselves in recoiling other rainbows. It ended by illuminating their skin and giving permission to kiss the other as phenomenology the same. She kissed again.
“You are not the other but self across the void.”
“Is that a theory of logic?”
“As true as the dragon Sicilian.”
“Just remember not to equate the right answer with the best writer.”
And with this, he turned out the window and almost filled the gap. But her incessant voice chimed in: “We must search the ruins for who held her chains and least her on me.”
“Are you sure there is a master other than her?”
“In a fight between a dragon and a tiger, the are two leashes for who gains control of the wind.” She bent her head over as if she was coiffing sunglasses and stared.
“You think in a cloud chamber.”
“Chess, poetry, legends, all are about recurring problems.”
“Shall we get to work?”
So, for the next three hours, they clawed and scratched at the tiles. Details first and then reaching for the central idea: pictures. Pictures about the people that she associated with. Clients. Housekeepers. Ordinary people.
And then when stacking photographs from the table that owned the hallway to their room, she saw a photograph which shocked and surprised her. Unlike most of the people that she had seen pictures of this man was young with a shock of uncut hair. And she knew him. She picked up with two fingers delicately the picture and nudged Kit with her left elbow. “Do you know him?”
“I see him often by Tin Hau Temple, near Nathan Road.”
“Playing Chinese chess?”
He closed his eyes trying to remember, as if thinking on a quiet night by the silver moon.[vi] “He was one of the men who concentrated on Western chess. And I think he was regarded as one of the best.”
Looking out the large window she realized that he had played stupid and was trying to get her to play the game with him and then would show his mastery. A surprise by masquerade in a great task: to begin to enspell her. She had no illusions about her will, but she made a note of that.
“Kit, have you found any talismans that would help one from being bewitched?”
Kit then closed next to her. “You think that this man was the master of your Dragon mother.” And then he began looking through the pictures that were scattered on the table to find some evidence. Casually asked: “Do you know his name?”
She nodded but did not say it. “Please look for the resistance.” She was methodical in searching the papers for anything that might hint at magic.
And as they scurried around the floor, she stopped, as if in midsentence.
“He gave me a cartoon.”
At this point, he stopped. “What did he say?”
“He told me his name was ‘Lucas’ but that was his way, in both English and native, of saying he wanted money.”
“You will have to spell this out more slowly as if you were teaching me the characters for the first time.” As he said this, both Kit and Maggie stood up. And she was riding on an invisible whiteboard with an invisible marker. “First in English: Lucan is like lucre, to another word for money. And in Chinese…” she wrote with her invisible pen “卢肯”[vii] “卢 is like rupee, 肯…”
“…is to be able to, so, to be able to make money. It’s a common double meaning in our sphere of the world.”
With her breath on his cheek, she nodded oh so closely. And then they began to hunt the snark, the small talisman that would grant her the power to resist his conniving charm. However, it was this time that he stopped.
“When you tossed the Bishop onto the dragon, what exactly did you mean?”
“It was something that Tal told me once when we were playing chess, that in a higher level of logic, which Bishop it was contained within the Bishop, and not on its place on the board.”
“Again, you will have to slowly walk me through the logic behind this.”
She stood and stared up into the popcorn-white ceiling and tried to pick the light and dark of the weaving white paint as a way of explaining what Tal had explained with a piece that was off the board in that small dark but many-hued shadow.
“In the logic that we use whether the bishop is white or black depends on the position on the board, because it is fixed by the rules of logic. Thus, in our logic, it is where the bishop is placed but it is not a balance of the Bishop.”
“Let us say that I understand that, even if that is rather fictional in reality, you are saying that in this higher logic, the Bishop has a sign which says white or black.”
“Yes, and that card has white on one side and black on the other.”
“So, in this higher-level logic, the Bishop knows which color it will be placed on.”
“Yes, unlike any form of chess in the West, the Bishop knows which color he had is and can choose any colour it likes.”[viii]
“Then all of you have to do is switch the bishops when you sit down, and change the color to any colour you like.”
[i] Become Destitute
[ii] Du Fu, “靜夜思” L 2
[iii] Nikolay Chernyshevsky, What is to Be Done?
[iv] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground Beginning
[v] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground Title of Second Part
[vi] Du Fu, “靜夜思” L 1
[vii] Lucan
[viii] Pink Floyd, “Any Colour You Like”