As I stood there I must have wavered too long. The moment came and went, and as I was going black and vibrant inside, as I prepared to step off the platform and greet a long, rolling gunmetal wave that seemed to be following the hydrofoil, there was a blast of a foghorn and I was shaken back into normal consciousness. I turned my head and suddenly saw the steel and glass towers penetrating a mantle of stationary mist, a Wagnerian spectacle of pure horror that overwhelmed any petty thoughts of my own. It so surprised me that I stepped back from the precipice and caught my breath.
It was enough to spoil the opportunity, and then we were passing Sulphur Sound and it was too late; we were too close to the machinery of life.
The terminal was its usual self, a pandemonium of wild-eyed commuters, food, and tea. I walked out directly into the traffic in the rain and strode across Con-naught Road. I had no umbrella and soon I was soaked, struggling between the tower blocks of Wing Lok, the Hing Yip Center and the Tung Hip and the Mandarin Building on Bonham Strand. They all seemed familiar and completely unknown at the same time, like things one has left behind in an abandoned room, having turned off the lights and closed the door weeks ago. And then one returns and everything is as it was. I walked miserably toward the Pemberton and the Kai Fung mansion, a fly stuck in a jam jar, and my mind did not — as was customary — race ahead of my body, but instead trailed far behind it. The familiar British names that always consoled: Wellington, Queen’s Road, Gough, Aberdeen, Cleverly. And so down in a quick bus ride to Wellington to Aberdeen and halfway down it the Sam La Lane playground, where a few unhappy brats were at it with their moist nannies, and farther on the street named, I assume, after Lord Elgin, thief of marbles. Elgin goes on and on and there is an Elgin Building and a building called the Elgin and the massive and brutal Sacred Heart Canossian at the end of it, where I used to buy an ice cream on hot nights and eat alone just because of the name. But the center of Elgin is the escalators that rise through the tenements and the tourist restaurants, none of them Chinese, making their way up the mountains toward railed platforms and the silent residential roads of the heights. The late-nighters gripping the moving handrails as they stare down into the alleys passing by. The feeling of fetes suspended and abandoned as people go home. I have always thought it is the best way to move through a city, on a moving beltway at the pace of a walker, everyone at the same speed and therefore never bumping into one another. I dropped into Taku and sat at the sushi bar dithering, and then decided I couldn’t risk my last pennies on a shrimp roll. I just needed to clear my head, or drink, and I didn’t have enough money to drink for long. One cold Asahi tap at the bar. The serving girls stared at me. It must have been the shaking hand, the foam on the lip. I went all the way up the mountain on the escalators and soon it began to rain and when I looked down at the canyons of vertical neon and horizontal laundry I saw that the pavement shone and the crowds had departed for a while. The wider roads here were nearly empty, the red and white taxis crawling along them with their service lights on, and the serious middle classes scurrying with their plastic umbrellas, anxious to get back to their tower blocks. I could feel the sweaty closeness of the destroyed forests, the humid gardens framed with concrete and the whir of the air-conditioning units.
I got to the last “station” and stood there under the white lights watching the young couples come up the escalators hand in hand, wondering if once I had looked like that, thin and tensile, with a girl on my arm and a look of waspish affluence. Western boys and Asian girls, children of banks and insurance companies and press agencies, couples forged by a crossroads in history. They were aliens to me, another species altogether. I gripped the wet rail and let the rain spatter my face. The shakes came on again. Where did I go from there, suspended between sky and water and laundry? The thought of suicide, invitingly voluptuous. I’d only have to slip over the railing and drop into the chasm where the pools of water were forming. Like tossing a paper airplane and letting gravity take over.
I walked back down on slippery steps. I found Hollywood Road and the bars were filled with Englishmen standing oblivious in the rain just as they do in London, beers in hand, mildly oafish and good-natured, but then I lost heart and I didn’t know what I was doing and I thought: I have to get to Kowloon, I have to get over the bay to Kowloon and have tea at the Intercontinental that I can’t pay for, but I’ll find an excuse and they’ll let me off. It would help me clear my head and calm down. So I turned and headed back to the water on the brink of paranoia. A thousand bucks won’t buy you tea and scones in Hong Kong.
Seabirds had scattered all over the buildings near the water, and the sky was almost black with the underbelly of a typhoon that was still hundreds of miles away. I rode over at rush hour. It was a short walk to Salisbury Road. The Intercontinental had long been my sanctuary of preference. After winning at Hong Kak in the old days I used to come here with Adrian Lipett and his girls and down their signature Dragon cocktails while that insufferable bore told us how the nine dragons of Kowloon were reputed to be able to pass silently through glass and therefore passed through the glass-walled Lobby Lounge on their way to a dawn dip in Victoria Harbor. Happy times. The lounge was quiet now, the windows streaked with rain. The darkness of the day made the quietly lit tables intimate. I sat by the glass and ordered an Earl Grey with some toast, and then, getting bolder, a fresh-squeezed orange juice.
It was then that I realized how hungry I was after the night I had just spent. My eye strayed to a buffet that had just been opened for the hotel guests. It was extraordinarily expensive, but of course one never pays up front and so I decided it was worth the risk. As I was getting up, the waitress came over and asked if I would like a champagne orange juice to start my day (I looked a little crumpled but it was a suit all the same). I said without hesitation how nice that would be. It was folly but since I was gambling with the next hour and its events already, I thought that I might as well aim high. I went to the buffet and loaded up a plate with sushi, fresh clams, croissants, grapefruit, and a small dish of oeufs Savoyards. I took them back to the window and wolfed them down. I was ravenous. I went back for another load and on the way ordered a second champagne orange juice, then a third. I knew that the bill was mounting up, but I had suddenly ceased caring. As I ceased caring, I ceased calculating the margin by which I wouldn’t be able to pay. I ordered coffee and a brandy. It was now about nine o’clock and the lounge was half filled with men reading the Asian Wall Street Journal. The rain intensified. Gradually the harbor view began to disappear. I went to the bathroom and washed my face. Where did I go from here? I was walled in with steel and glass, by propriety and by security personnel. My options were limited, to put it mildly. True, I could slip quietly away by walking confidently to the elevators and leaving a newspaper opened at the table, indicating that I wished to return. But there were uniformed staff around the elevators and that would probably not work. I could give a room number and sign the chit and hope that it would not be recognized. Asian hotels train their staff meticulously, however, no doubt with precisely these eventualities in mind. It was a calamitous risk. Alternatively, I could fake a heart attack in the middle of the room. That would work, up to a point. But the fakery would be easily exposed within the hour and the medical services would liaise with the hotel about the unpaid bill. Unwise. That left outright flight via a back door and exit stairs. Not classy, but effective. It was the one thing that might take them by surprise. As I walked back out to the lounge I tried to plan it all before I executed it, but my mind was fogged and I could not work out the details. A fourth champagne cocktail was waiting for me on the table, obscenely amicable, and instead of running for it I just sat and gulped it down. And I was still hungry. I ordered some blinis and caviar à la carte.