Once they finished eating, the girls wiped their mouths with the tablecloth. One of them picked up a pack of China cigarettes when no one was looking and stuffed it into her bra. He sighed in commiseration for her breast, which had to share its cup with cigarettes. He heard the girl in charge say:
‘Come on, girls, carry this drunken kitty over to the guest house,’
Two girls tried lifting him up by the arms, but had trouble holding him, as if he were a rag doll. He heard a girl with a mole behind one ear grumble, The damned dog! That angered him. He watched as one of the girls picked up his briefcase, unzipped it, and took out the pistol, turning it over in her hand to get a good look at it. He cried out in alarm from the ceiling: Put that down! It could go off. But they might as well have been deaf. God help me! She shoved the pistol back into the briefcase, then unzipped an inner pocket and removed his mistress’s photograph. Come look at this! she said. The red girls crowded round and happily voiced their opinions. His anger reached its peak, as a stream of filthy language spewed from his mouth. The girls were oblivious to it all.
At long last, the red serving girls managed to hoist up my body enough to drag me out of the dining room and onto the hallway carpet, as if they were disposing of a corpse. One of them kicked me in the calf- intentionally. Slut. My flesh may be insensate, but my spirit isn’t. Hovering three feet above their heads, I flapped my wings and began to glide through the air, following behind my useless corporeal body and gazing at it with deep sadness. It was, it seemed, a very long hallway. I watched the liquor seep out of my mouth and run down my neck. It stank to high heaven, and the red girls plugged their noses to avoid it. One had an attack of the dry heaves. With my head slumped on my chest, my neck looked like a wilted stalk of garlic. No wonder my head lolled back and forth. I couldn’t see my face, but had a bird’s-eye view of both my pale ears. One of the red girls followed along carrying my briefcase.
At long last we made it to the end of the seemingly endless hallway, where I saw a familiar large hall. They dumped my body on the carpet, face up. The sight of that face shocked me: eyes squeezed shut, skin the color of old, torn window paper. My parted lips revealed a motley mouthful of teeth, some white, some black. A foul, boozy breath spilled out, and it was all I could do to keep from throwing up. Shivers wracked my flesh, and my pants were soaked. What a pity, I’d wet myself.
After resting to catch their breath, the red girls carried me out of the hall. A sea of sunflowers lay beneath a blood-red sun, the golden yellow blossoms exuding warmth against the scarlet background. A gleaming silver sedan was parked on a smooth cement road that cut through the sunflower forest. Diamond Jin climbed into the back seat of the car, which drove off slowly, the twin gentlemen waving as it passed by and picked up speed. The red girls dragged me down the road to the accompaniment of a barking dog beneath a sunflower plant whose stem was as thick as a tree trunk. Its glossy black body, topped by white ears, lurched back and forth each time it barked, accordion-fashion. Where were they taking me? Lights all around shone like shifty eyes. All the machinery was just as it had been that morning, including the windlass at the mouth of the mine. A gang of black-faced men in hard-hats came walking up. For some unknown reason, I was afraid to meet up with these men. If they had friendly intentions, well and good, but if not, I was in for it. The men quickly lined up on both sides of the road, forming a gauntlet past which the red serving girls carried me. My nostrils picked up the smell of sweat and damp mine-shaft stench. The men’s eyes bored through my body like drills. Some hurled curses as I passed by, but the red serving girls held their heads high and thrust out their chests proudly, ignoring the men. Then I realized that the curses, filled with sexual innuendo, were directed at them, not at me.
They carried me into a remote little building, where two women in white sat across from each other at a writing desk, their knees touching; some words had been carved on the desk. Their knees moved away slightly when we entered the shack; one of the women pressed a button on the wall, causing a door to open slowly. An elevator, apparently. After they carried me inside and closed the door, I saw Vd guessed correctly. The descent was meteoric, and I followed my body down the shaft, like a kite being tugged by its string. Down and down we went. A coal mine, I thought admiringly, which meant that all the activity would be underground. I was convinced they could have built an entire Great Wall underground if they had wanted to. The elevator shuddered noisily three times – we had reached the bottom. A blinding white light filled my eyes as I was carried into a sumptuous grand hall on whose watery smooth marble walls human shadows danced; the relief patterns on the ceiling were illuminated by hundreds of exquisite little lamps. Flowers and potted plants were arrayed around four enormous angular columns with marble facing. The sight of scabby goldfish swimming in an ultra-modern aquarium made my skin crawl. The girls placed my body in room 401.1 had no idea how the number 401 was arrived at, and wondered what kind of place this was. Manhattan’s high-rises stretch up to Heaven; Liquorland’s reach down to Hell. The girls stripped the shoes off my feet before laying me on a bed; my briefcase wound up on a tea table. They left. Five minutes later, a cream-colored serving girl opened the door and walked in to put a cup of tea on the table. Some tea for your honor, I heard her say to my body.
My body did not reply.
The cream-colored girl wore heavy makeup; her lashes were as thick as hog bristles. Just then the telephone at the head of the bed rang. She reached out and picked up the receiver with tapered fingers. The room was so quiet I could hear a man’s voice on the other end.
'Is he awake?’
‘He hasn’t moved. He’s scary.’
‘See if he’s got a heartbeat.’
She laid her palm on my chest; a palpable look of disgust on her face.
‘He’s got one,’ she said.
‘Give him some sobering-up tonic’
‘OK.’
The cream-colored girl left the room. I knew she’d be right back. She returned with a metal syringe, the kind veterinarians use. Since the tip was made of soft plastic, I didn’t have to worry about an injection. After inserting the tip between my lips, she forced some medicinal liquid through the syringe.
Before long, I heard the sounds of my body coming to and saw its arms move. It said something. It emitted a powerful force that tried to snag me. I struggled, turning myself into a sort of suction cup on the ceiling to resist being drawn downward; but I sensed that a part of me had already fallen prey to the force.