Joe was surprised and disturbed to discover that Vincent was smiling.
“Lisa came by my house.” He struggled to get the sentence out.
Vincent stood up, releasing his breath, walked around the room once, and stopped in front of the window.
“Today it looks like rain, so Lisa went out with her umbrella. No matter what she’s doing she always thinks ahead. How do men with wives like this live? I honestly can’t imagine what I’d do without her. . just as this office couldn’t manage without you.”
“So you’re still hiding from her?”
“Yes, you know everything. Now I need to go back and check on things. If she can’t find me she’ll toss all my files into the stairwell. Then I’ll have to send workers down to save them.”
Vincent slipped out without a sound, so quietly that Joe wondered if he’d even been real. To get at the reason he felt this way, Joe opened his book again and read a page of it. The story sank into confusion. This time the person falling down the steps wasn’t even the coal bearer; it was five palace maids. The maids were in disarray, climbing the stairs over and over, and each time they were pushed back by two fiendish guards. Joe’s eyes were drawn in fascination to the scenery within the palace gates. The interior was, oddly enough, an uncultivated flower garden filled with withered bamboo stalks. “The maids will never abandon their attempt.” Joe read up to this sentence. He recalled that his boss, Vincent, had just said a similar thing. He turned back to the beginning of the book and looked at the illustration of the cat on the first page. He found that the cat had lost its enchanting quality. The yellow eyes were lusterless. Returning to the previous passage, he read about the fountains in the garden. They were not manmade fountains; water from underground spontaneously leapt up through fissures in the earth. Some of the geysers were between ten and twenty meters high. The maids rushed up once again and were dashed back down, and the guards forced the palace gates shut. A gust of wind blew the maids’ long hair loose, tangling it and obscuring their eyes. An image rose up in Joe’s mind of a day in April, and an event that had taken place on the street in front of his house. That day, when he returned from work he saw his neighbors standing in twos and threes at the side of the road, looking ill at ease. Turning to catch what they were staring at, Joe saw a man and a woman dressed in rags walking slowly past, one before and one behind, looking straight ahead. What discomfited Joe wasn’t this sight but rather the feeling of his neighbors’ eyes on his back, as if their gaze could bore inside him. The couple walked on, but after a little while they returned. Joe felt the tension in the strained atmosphere, and he heard the creaking sound made by a kneading fist. The odor of spring rose from the damp earth.
“What’s the matter?” Joe couldn’t help questioning the old woman at his side.
“It was an earthquake. Didn’t you feel it? Everyone came outside.”
“But those two people. .”
“They’re not from around here. Shhh, be quiet.”
There hadn’t been an earthquake that day, so why were all these people deathly pale? The peaceful side street where Joe lived was full of secrets. Even Maria felt that the atmosphere there was oppressive. Her favorite platitude was, “Once something gets started, you might as well finish it.” It meant that she could take all the craziness around them and make things even crazier. That’s why in their house every object she touched was electrically charged, to some extent or other, and sometimes sparks burst out. What would the street look like if it really were fluctuating in an earthquake?
“Joe! Joe. .” Someone was calling him.
He opened his office door and saw Lisa, her face gray and filthy with dirt. Although she had lost her customary glamor, she showed a kind of touching charm.
“Did Vincent come looking for you? I just can’t catch up with him. Look at me in this state — you can see he’s done for.”
“No, Lisa, that’s not it. You need to be a little more patient. He loves you.”
“I’m not talking about that. Who said he has to love me? I’m talking about him. He’s scared to show his face — what’s he so afraid of? And there’s his disgusting behavior out on the lawn. . He was dressed up in formal wear and rolling around in the grass. His spirit’s shattered, but I wanted to help him recover. Now it’s too late.”
Lisa hopped up onto Joe’s desk and perched there swinging her legs provocatively. Yet the expression on her face was entirely serious, something you didn’t see often. She listened attentively, concentrating for a moment, then said to Joe, “There’s a magnetic field in your office. Vincent has known about it for a long time. He’s mentioned it to me several times. So I went to find Maria. Maria is a remarkable woman. As soon as I entered your house I felt like I was walking on thin ice. Maria, Maria, she’s exceptional!” Her husky voice sounded as if she were singing.
As she didn’t get down from the desk, Joe began to feel terribly awkward. Although the difference in their ages wasn’t very great, she was his superior’s wife. Joe had no idea how to deal with her frivolous manner; furtively, he hoped that someone would enter the room. But no one did. Lisa sat planted on that high perch. Already she’d forgotten Joe’s existence as she glanced back and forth along the cluster of buildings outside. Perhaps she was looking for her husband. Joe stealthily snuck to the doorway, opened the door a bit, and sidled out into the hallway. His secretary looked at him sympathetically: “That woman’s out for blood.”
Joe returned to his office, after taking a turn at the bottom of the stairs, to find Lisa already gone. What door had she used? She must have taken the elevator. She’d pulled out the book Joe had thrust under a pile of contracts and left a peculiar bookmark between pages 50 and 51: the shriveled corpse of a mantis. Joe set the rather large mantis at eye level and scrutinized it. Its yellow, jadelike eyes gave off a gleam he was already familiar with. He even felt its stabbing legs move between his fingers. On the surface of page 50, it looked like something had bitten a few holes in the letters. Could the mantis have done this? It had been dead for a long time. Well then, Lisa must have dug out the words with her sharp fingernails. While she did this she would have worn a look of rapacious concentration. What kind of woman had Vincent married? Joe put down the book, pressing the mantis inside as before. Now the shape of that enormous story in his head seemed a little vague, as if everything in it were becoming tangled together. Yet there was a borderland, extending to the sky above the North Pole, with masses of frozen clouds. Was the story he’d just been reading a story of Country F? Or a Nepalese story? Joe hadn’t gone over the details in the book’s introduction. He always started right in on the first page of a book, and then slowly entered into its web. Often the story’s background was one he developed for himself. Or perhaps it was all in his imagination. Invariably, as he reached the middle of the book, he began to suspect that the sentences were jumping from his head onto the page. Otherwise, why was it that when he assumed the story was set in Mongolia, the hunters wearing short gowns in the beginning section all began wearing long robes?
Vincent and Lisa vanished without a trace, all the way up to the end of the workday. Joe figured they must have gone someplace in the city, the two of them calling out unceasingly but extremely distant from each other. If they were to meet, they would have to cross a river. But the sky was already dark; the water was very deep; there were no boats on its banks. Joe walked to the bar on the corner. He looked inside and saw Reagan drinking alone at a table. Hadn’t he gone back home earlier? Joe stood riveted in place, staring. Reagan chased one glass with another, as if he were drinking water. There were some papers spread out on the table that might be the contract they had signed in the morning. He remembered what Reagan had said at the time, “The reenactment of tragedy is sometimes necessary.” Afterward, he’d affixed his signature to the agreement. Now he had spread the contract out on the table in the bar to look it over, but what was he after? Was he still thinking of those two workers drowned at the farm? His jacket had a dark stain on it. Probably he’d vomited. Even then the barkeeper didn’t make him leave. Maybe he needed customers; the place was really desolate. He stood behind the counter, obviously watching every movement of this drunkard, so as to intervene at any moment. Joe didn’t want to go in because in their relationship Reagan always took the role of the leader. When Joe thought of that scorching, glittering farmland, he grew dizzy, feeling himself inferior. Reagan lived there year in and year out, but he still ran to the gloomy city every so often. On the surface he came to do business and sign contracts, but who knew what he really came for? Every time he proclaimed that he was going back that same day. Could it be that every time was like today, when he didn’t go back but came instead to this low kind of place to soak himself in liquor? Reagan raised his blood-red eyes and stared in Joe’s direction. Joe knew Reagan hadn’t discovered him standing outside the window; he was terribly drunk.