“Vincent! Vincent! Aren’t you lonely?” She strained to shout, but had no voice.
She remembered that a vacuum doesn’t transmit sound. She almost despaired.
But from a distance Vincent raised his eyebrows at her and made an ambiguous gesture. The beggars turned toward her with loud lewd laughter. Lisa suspected that she wasn’t clothed. She couldn’t confirm this, because she couldn’t see her own body. She remembered that episode of nakedness on the farm, although the feeling then had been entirely different. Why must Vincent be among those beggars? When he approached, Lisa saw that he, like the beggars, wore a lewd expression. She couldn’t keep her face from reddening. Vincent stopped in his steps. It appeared he didn’t wish to approach her too closely. What was he thinking? Vincent, the owner of that immense and orderly clothing business, had unexpectedly hid himself in dark causeways, associating with beggars! Lisa thought with apprehension of the recent torrent of order forms. .
Outside the window there were water birds calling. Their house was in the center of the city, so where had the birds come from?
“Ma’am, those aren’t birds. It’s me mimicking them outside your window.”
Booker, his whole face filled with a smile, sat opposite her. He had obviously recovered from the fatigue of the previous day. His appearance was a little eccentric: a large specimen of a spider was stuck to his forehead.
“A gift from the farm. Night and day I am inside a spider’s web now. I managed to catch it at the door of a restaurant; once I caught it, it died. My lover and I made it into a specimen together. Its gigantic web is just like mosquito netting!”
Vincent was in fact working at the company’s head office, just as before. After returning from the farm, he described his mental outlook as being “as calm as water.” The Chinese woman (here she is Chinese) came to his office once. She wasn’t wearing a satin qipao, but was dressed like a worker who cleaned the streets, with a pen stuck in the pocket of her jacket. On entering she rounded the desk with practiced movements and sat on Vincent’s knee. She drew the pen from her pocket and wrote characters on the desktop. The characters she drew were like square rooms, stably nailed to the paper; each single one was correspondingly independent. As Vincent leaned in to look, he saw there was nothing on the paper. Vincent felt the woman’s body to be unusually light. When she twisted around to stare at him, he saw square rooms in her black eyes.
His desire was aroused again by this peculiar woman, but he sat there without moving. He thought if he moved even just a bit the woman would disappear. He thought of how this was another form of being “as calm as water.” The crows on the rooftop across the street made a sudden, slight sound. The woman stood with a start, and walked outside, and Vincent went with her. Later they went to her home. Vincent believed it was her home — if not, then what place could it be? It was a dark room on the twenty-fourth floor. In the corner was a gigantic spider weaving a web. He reflected that the gray spider looked familiar. Vincent and the woman lay down on the double bed, but their bodies did not touch.
Afterward, he went daily to the twenty-fourth floor after getting off work, forgetting that he should return home. During the day his job was very busy. The company was expanding daily. Inside the factory the machines roared, and outside the factory there was heavy traffic. Vincent hadn’t intended to expand the business. The circumstances of its development were beyond his control. He saw that his enterprise was spreading in all directions, like the background of the stories Joe had divulged to him. These days when he saw Joe in his office, Vincent felt perplexed: how did his business come to have an employee like Joe? All along he’d referred to Joe in his heart as “a two-faced man.” On Reagan’s farm, when in the midst of unreality his passion caused him unbearable suffering, he had thought more than once of Joe, as well as of those books hidden in his office. Perhaps it wasn’t by chance that Joe had taken a job in his company? But he did not remember that event from twenty years ago too clearly. The sole impression he retained was that at the time Joe didn’t like to speak. When he opened his mouth he grew very anxious.
The Chinese woman had never spoken before. Vincent surmised that she used a different system of language. The door to her room was always unlatched, so he pushed it open and went in. At times she sat next to the bed, at times she sat before the window, and when she sat by the window, Vincent stood behind her and saw numerous square-shaped characters in the sky outside. The pieces of the characters kept shifting, seemingly very busy. The woman was evenly proportioned and of average height, and, as before with the black-clad woman, he couldn’t determine her age. Vincent saw her as his lover, but he wasn’t eager to touch her body. He thought, for no reason, that if he touched her he would drop into a depthless void. Although he saw her sitting in the old twenty-four-story high-rise every day, he still couldn’t refrain from suspicion: was she from Reagan’s farm in the south? Although the geographical location of Reagan’s farm was in the West, the landscape had a concentrated flavor of the East; therefore, he could go there to pursue the Eastern woman from his dream. She looked so lonely, with a mind clear of desires, just like a dream. Perhaps she truly was a different woman’s (for example, the Arab woman’s) dream? Vincent thought that many such women must be hidden within this overcast city. Hadn’t he already known quite a few of them? Some of these women stayed for a while in shabby hotels, some rambled around in remote side streets, and some, like this Chinese woman, had a room in some tall high-rise. . Vincent was a little distracted in his mind, a little dizzy in his head. He came to a stop leaning his hand for support on a large cabinet. He saw the woman showing her teeth as she smiled at him. Her teeth were slightly yellow, as if from smoking, although there was no smell of cigarettes in the room. The woman made a sign for him to sit by the bed.
As soon as he sat down, the woman came over and embraced him, sitting on his knee. Vincent was immediately excited. As their naked bodies stuck together, he heard the sound of flowing waves inside her body. Then he was lost in the incessant up-and-down motions of deep water. This one time, Vincent’s bodily desire was finally released. This kind of release wasn’t gained through reaching climax, but rather was in a change of direction halfway through. As for Vincent, in this sexual encounter he lost all his perception. Before, with Lisa, he used to imagine himself as a tropical animal, like a zebra, and through that kind of fantasy he grew thousands of times more amorous. But with this woman it was a different matter. He abandoned fantasies about himself, following her into a drifting world of water. Together they entered dark ravines and made love there. A voice was always in his ear: “Is this the sea or is this a lake? Is this the sea or a lake?. .” He thought it ought to be the woman speaking, but she’d shut her lips and eyes tightly in the deep, swaying water, and was not inclined to speak at all. Vincent’s fervor ran high as he felt himself using his mind to make love. He tried his utmost to recover his amorousness, but he was defeated. The undulation of the water favored their sexual rhythm. The manifestation of his flesh and blood became unimportant. There was a brief time when Mr. Reagan’s rhythmic groans could be heard from some distant place. Once Vincent heard them he understood the implication of the groans. Could it be that this was the lake on the farm? The Chinese woman’s body was agile as she constantly varied her position. Vincent’s own body, in these peculiar movements, also became young. Yet there was no climax of flesh. He suddenly understood one thing: the reason there was no obvious climax was in order to avoid the listlessness following climax.