The two of them heard, at the same moment, the sound of steps upstairs, although there was no one upstairs. They looked with care and listened with care, one standing on the stairs, one standing in the kitchen. It didn’t sound like a person’s footsteps. It sounded more like a large bird, perhaps a hawk. Reagan wondered if it could be the smell of a corpse spreading from upstairs. Someone flew down the steps. This was a person. It was Martin.
“Martin!”
“What is it, Mr. Reagan?” He blushed, hiding the large bag in his hands behind his back.
“You aren’t afraid of hawks?”
“Of course I’m afraid.” He laughed, “But there’s nowhere to hide. It drops like a guillotine, cutting your body. Your body and your head are separated instantly. You don’t have time to reflect on it.” With this last sentence he raised his voice, as if making a joke.
It was Reagan’s turn to blush. On the open expanses of the flat-lands, he had been pursued by hawks before. He thought once again of Ida borrowing the sickle. That dark, dusky night, a muffled thunderclap under the earth had shaken his mind into a black pitch. He said to himself: “Climax is an inferno. Because the delight of not reaching release is in the elimination of the body.”
“Good, good.” Martin smiled again, seeming to see into Reagan’s thoughts.
Lisa fled swiftly from the scorching sun. Her feet were blistered with walking, but still she couldn’t stop. Everywhere, underneath the soil of the farm, there were people conversing, all kinds of people, all kinds of voices. She thought it wouldn’t take even a few days before she grew used to these voices under the ground. At night she sometimes slept underneath the rubber trees, and at other times at the lakeside. The snakes had stopped encroaching on her and stayed far away. Even so she distinctly heard the sound of their slinking in one group after another as they dove to the earth’s core. She thought of Vincent. What was Vincent? He was her dream, the dream she hadn’t woken from for many years. And Vincent also lived inside of a dream. She remembered him saying to her that he was going to the farm he’d seen in his dream. Because of the dream he came here, and then he left. But she, following the landscape of his dream, remained lost inside that landscape. Now she was so strong Vincent wouldn’t even recognize her. Just before dawn, she carried on a conversation with Ida.
The two women did not speak about their own homelands. They talked rather of the great deserts in Africa and life in tents in the desert. The two of them cherished an unusually strong aspiration toward a way of life they’d never experienced. Ida wielded a large sickle in her hands, moving back and forth across the clumps of reed. Lisa asked her what she was cutting.
“Whatever’s there I’m cutting. At least, I want to cut down a few things.”
Lisa lowered her head and saw that her own shoe was almost chopped in two.
“Before much time passes you won’t need these shoes,” Ida said, unconcerned.
Her words amazed Lisa. She sat there lost in thought, and didn’t notice that the girl had left.
In the distance there was a car driving toward her, like a blue-shelled insect. Against the golden ground it was utterly conspicuous. Lisa grew a little nervous, without any reason to be. She stood still since there was no way to walk with that shoe. The car gradually came to a stop beside her. The driver Booker’s straw hat extended from the window. This wasn’t her car, her car was a milky yellow color. But she got in anyway.
“Where did our car go?”
“This is our car,” Booker said.
“How come it’s this color then?”
“You’re going color-blind. It happens to everyone who stays here for a long time.”
“You’ve been here before?” She was surprised.
“Yes. This is practically my homeland. Is it like that for you? They all say the farm owner went mad ten years ago.”
Lisa recalled the cheerless gentleman in the sales office and couldn’t help a bitter smile.
When the car drove past the entrance to Reagan’s house, Booker stretched his head out the window. His face showed his confusion. As if absorbed by his thoughts, he whistled. Lisa saw Reagan walking out of the building. His figure was cut in two at the waist and in the middle was a section of blank space. In his hands he carried fishing tackle.
“We all turn toward this place, because the soil here can catch fire,” Booker said.
“How do you know?” Lisa asked curiously.
“Yesterday I tested it. The golden earth is just like coal. Miraculous earth!”
He suddenly looked heavy with drowsiness. Lisa worried that he might overturn the car in a ditch.
The car accelerated. It was like a bullet running madly along the burning soil, yet Booker, uncaring, bent snoring over the steering wheel. Lisa’s body sweated like rainfall. She realized the car was no longer on the road, which could be felt from the bumping of the wheels. She shoved Booker. Booker kept sleeping. She looked at the speedometer and found that the needle was broken. “Will we plunge into the gulf?” Her mind oozed this thought. She couldn’t make out the landscape outside for the sea of fire that filled her eyes. The car was unbearably hot inside.
“Booker! Booker!” She screamed until her voice was exhausted.
Booker moved a bit, and murmured, “Don’t get so excited, this will be over soon. .”
Lisa thought he was trying to kill himself. In desperation she tried jumping from the car, but the door wouldn’t open.
As she flailed frantically, the car came to a stop with a thud, dong. Booker still hadn’t woken up. All at once she could open the door. A burst of hot air blew in from the still-fierce sun. Their car had stopped in a patch of peach trees that were all on fire; the light from the flames lit up the sky. Lisa promptly hid herself in the car.
“Every so often they catch fire,” Booker said, with an expression of remorse. “We’ll leave the farm soon. Everyone is saying that a worker died. She must have jumped into the lake because her body caught on fire.”
On the road home Lisa fell asleep. She had many dreams, but the backdrop of her dreams was too dark, and nothing could be seen clearly. When she woke Booker told her she had been calling for a girl named Ida. He asked her who this girl was. The name sounded familiar. She told him it was Reagan’s girlfriend. On hearing this Booker was struck with wonder and couldn’t close his mouth for smiling. “Everyone knows that man has no substance. Just ask anyone on the farm and you’ll learn.” Lisa wondered dispassionately what it must be like to have no substance. Booker seemed to hear the words in her heart, and went on to say, “With no substance, he can pass through a sea of flames.”
Lisa sighed. “What kind of woman is Ida?”
She and Booker returned home, but Vincent wasn’t there. The rooms retained the look they’d had when she left. There was no apparent sign that anyone had come through. Lisa thought that Vincent might have already disappeared from their house and become a man without a home. Although he wasn’t there, Lisa could still smell his odor, a smell she hadn’t perceived before, which hinted of anesthetic. Shrouded in this smell, she and her husband were closer at a distance. Perhaps Vincent was staying in the slum district, in the underground tunnel shaped like a well that slanted as it extended into the depths of the earth, with a few lit candles along the way.
Lisa entered a dream. In the dream she had no need to go looking for Vincent because, like a hound following its quarry, he pursued her. Where Vincent was were also beggars, beggars eying Lisa greedily and menacingly, but they didn’t want anything from her. Lisa strove in desperation to enter the small crisscrossing and interlocking alleyways. She was conducting a battle of wits with Vincent. But Vincent met each changing situation with one response. He oozed out from underground like a rising mushroom cloud; the cloud dispersed, and he stood surrounded by a crowd of beggars. Halfway through Lisa woke and saw the palm tree — patterned curtains shaking, intermittently rolling like the high tide, before she tumbled back into the dimly lit midst of unreality.