Where is the book you put me in? asked the woman.
This is the atlas, he said. This is the book. — And he bent down and touched the pavement. He knew that everything was set upon a single page.
Open the book, she said weakly.
It's open already.
Where am I, then? Am I inside or outside?
I don't know, he murmured, suddenly resentful. I don't know where I am anymore, either. I lost my freedom because of you.
Eastward, where the streets became grayer and narrower, there was a stand of aquariums in the street, the goldfish and the other deep blue ones he didn't know slowly fanning their tails within glass worlds like the spirits in the bottles in the liquor store whose walls formed part of the thoroughfare, or the banana-clusters which hung over the apples in the fruit stand, beset by swaying red lights. The signs were carved and painted now, not lighted. Sometimes they halfway or entirely spanned the narrow alleyways like stilt roots and flying buttresses. Windows and gratings and balconies clutched each other across spaces of narrow darkness.
He bought a bottle of rice whiskey at the liquor store and poured it out upon the pale sidewalk. — Here is your blood, he said. Now it's in the book.
A girl in pink, with scarlet lips, was leaning against the ice cream freezer in the liquor store talking with her husband, and when her mouth shaped itself into O's the crimson seemed to rise like smoke-rings to join the red signs and suddenly the husband was lighting a cigarette, and the fire at its end seemed to have come from her mouth. She touched the husband's hand. Across the street, a man was searching through a pile of apples, and when he found one that seemed redder than the rest and held it up, the watcher looked at the girl and saw that her mouth had just made an O again. Here was the being who could save the woman he cared for by bringing her entirely in or out of the atlas. Enchanted, he came closer, until he could hear her speak waterfalls that peacock-tailed so brightly down the wall of the Stock Exchange, losing themselves in the hill of potted yellow flowers which bordered the long, long escalator. (Underneath were the hundreds of white gambling booths.) He caught a red O in the air. It was hard like a marble. Throwing it down onto the pavement so that it shattered and disappeared, he muttered: Here are your bones. Now they're in the book. — The girl's ruby syllables rolled him away, so that floundering past a marble lobby (evidently of a seafood restaurant in whose immaculate tanks swam crowds of giant silver carp), he could peer but briefly into a small store to see the round table and the two girls slowly slicing a mound of ginseng. He fell through a red bubble of her delicious spit, tumbled into the market of dried fish whose broad gray mummies lashed together resembled palm fronds, was carried through the restaurant whose two men in black tuxedos were just lighting the final torch around the golden border of a red sign that uttered something incomprehensible to him; and like the men in suits and ties on holiday riding escalators up the hills of Ocean Park he swam volitionlessly past two ladies whose store contained nothing but dried white shark fins, each behind its own pane of glass like some strange sea-trophy; that was when he realized that he was in the sea.
He bought a shark fin for one Hong Kong dollar. Then he took it around the corner where the two ladies would not see and be hurt. He slapped it gently down onto the hard epidermis of the street and whispered: Here is your flesh. Now it's in the book.
He thought he heard her moan.
A man unhooked a bundle of dried fish from the awning pole of his shining store, covered the boxes of nuts with burlap, returned to unhook the bale of dried eels, then the hanging light bulb, then stepped outside and pulled down a rusty wall of darkness over everything.
Next door a stern man was still sitting behind his desk, emperor of rolls and scrolls of marbled cloth, and he stared out the window. He gaped his gristly jaws and gulped, which proved him to be a fish.
Entering that shop, the watcher bought a length of midnight-black cloth and unravelled some threads from it. — Here is your hair, he said, letting go the strands. Now it's in the book.
The people whose ahs and ows twisted in the guts of the night now drowned the scarlet-lipped girl's speech entirely; so in hopes of finding other luminescence he ascended a steep hill of meat and lighted produce stands whose pears and potatoes shone like lanterns (their bok choy greener than darkness, their cats mewing like tweaked piano wire). Strings of lights transected the heavens to encourage the ones struggling up that coagulation of night, carrying those purchased brilliancies away darkened in plastic bags.
The Sinew Co. was being closed, but inside the shopping malls, people were still peering and pointing, the women especially wistfully touching the glass of Rainbow Leatherware Co. and Rolie Collection. A restaurant was serving tea. He bought a cup of it and cupped his hands over the steam. Then he brought his cupped hands down to the floor and said: Here is your breath. Now it's in the book. Now you're complete in my book at last.
The whole city sighed, or perhaps the sigh came from somewhere deeper than that. Then the voice said: Thank you. I love you.
The ferry buildings were like space stations, with their lights and roundness and dockings; but they did not whirl, only rose and fell, and a reflection of the sea rose and fell in their television-like windows. Beyond the Star terminal rose a golden bowtie of neon, tall and absurd, crowned by a white trapezoid and a blue spire. Forgetting the scarlet-lipped girl and the woman whom he'd saved, he let himself be caught by the blue neon-light on black water.