Wings of Fire
Page 69
I hadn’t forewarned Bob about this. Well, I had meant to, but words had failed me at the last moment. Papa had moved in for the kill a lot more quickly than I had thought he would. Before Bob could say anything at all, therefore, I decided to pop a revelation of my own. “I think, Papa,” I said, “that it’s time for me to show him the dragon.”
We all trooped into the kitchen.
The dragon was even more inanimate than usual. Bob put his ear up to the scales; he knocked his knuckles raw. When I listened, I could hear nothing at all at first; the whisper of the sea was my own blood surging through my brain’s capillaries, constricted as they were with worry. Bob said, “This is what I’ve been eating, Janice?”
I directed him over to where Ah Quoc was now seasoning the vat, chopping the herbs with one hand and sprinkling with the other, while my two aunts stirred, prodded, and gossiped like the witches from Macbeth. “Look, look,” I said, and I pointed out the mass of still unpulped fin that protruded from the glop, “see how its texture matches that of the two dorsal fins.”
“It hardly seems alive,” Bob said, trying to pry a scale loose so he could peer at the quick.
“You’ll need a red-hot paring knife to do that,” I said. Then, when Papa wasn’t listening, I whispered in his ear, “Please, just go along with all this. It really looks like ‘fate worse than death’ time for me if you don’t. I know that marriage is the farthest thing from your mind right now, but I’ll make it up to you somehow. You can get concubines. I’ll even help pick them out. Papa won’t mind that, it’ll only make him think you’re a stud.”
Bob said, and it was the thing I’d hoped he’d say, “Well, there are certain questions that have always nagged at me… certain questions which, if only I knew the answers to them, well… let’s just say I’d die happy.”
My father positively beamed at this. “My son,” he said, clapping Bob resoundingly on the back, “I already know that I shall die happy. At least my daughter won’t be marrying a Thai. I just couldn’t stand the thought of one of those loathsome creatures dirtying the blood of the House of Lim.”
I looked at my father full in the face. Could he have already forgotten that only last night I had called him a bastard? Could he be that deeply in denial? “Bob,” I said softly, “I’m going to take you to confront the dragon.” Which was more than my father had ever done, or I myself.
Confronting the dragon was, indeed, a rather tall order, for no one had done so since the 1930s, and Bangkok had grown from a sleepy backwater town into a monster of a metropolis; we knew only that the dragon’s coils reached deep into the city’s foundations, crossed the river at several points, and, well, we weren’t sure if he did extend all the way to Nonthaburi; luckily, there is a new expressway now, and once out of the crazy traffic of the old part of the city it did not take long, riding the sleek airconditioned Nissan taxicab my father had chartered for us, to reach the outskirts of the city. On the way, I caught glimpses of many more Bangkoks that my father’s blindness had denied me; I saw the Blade Runneresque towers threaded with mist and smog, saw the buildings shaped like giant robots and computer circuit boards designed by that eccentric genius, Dr. Sumet; saw the not-very-ancient and very-very-multicolored temples that dotted the cityscape like rhinestones in a cowboy’s boot; saw the slums and the palaces, cheek by jowl, and the squamous rooftops that could perhaps have also been little segments of the dragon poking up from the miasmal collage; we zoomed down the road at breakneck speed to the strains of Natalie Cole, who, our driver opined, is “even better than Mai and Christina”.
How to find the dragon? Simple. I had the scroll. Now and then, there was a faint vibration of the parchment. It was a kind of dousing.
“This off-ramp,” I said, “then left, I think.” And to Bob I said, “Don’t worry about a thing. Once we reach the dragon, you’ll ask him how to get out of this whole mess. He can tell you, has to tell you actually; once that’s all done, you’ll be free of me, I’ll be free of my father’s craziness, he’ll be free of his obsession.”
Bob said, “You really shouldn’t put too much stock in what the dragon has to tell you.”
I said, “But he always tells the truth!”
“Well yes, but as a certain wily Roman politician once said, ‘What is truth?’ Or was that Ronald Reagan?”
“Oh, Bob,” I said, “if push really came to shove, if there’s no solution to this whole crisis… could you actually bring yourself to marry me?”
“You’re very beautiful,” Bob said. He loves to be all things to all people. But I don’t think there’s enough of him to go round. I mean, basically, there are a couple of dozen Janice Lims waiting in line for the opportunity to sit at Bob’s feet. But, you know, when you’re alone with him, he has this ability to give you every scintilla of his attention, his concern, his love, even; it’s just that there’s this nagging concern that he’d feel the same way if he were alone with a Beethoven string quartet, say, or a plate of exquisitely spiced naem sod.
We were driving through young paddy fields now; the nascent rice has a neon-green color too garish to describe. The scroll was shaking continuously and I realized we must be rather close to our goal; I have to admit that I was scared of out of my wits.
The driver took us through the gates of a Buddhist temple. The scroll vibrated even more energetically. Past the main chapel, there were more gates; they led to a Brahmin sanctuary; past the Indian temple there was yet another set of gates, over which, in rusty wrought-iron, hung the character Lim, which is two trees standing next to one another. The taxi stopped. The scroll’s shaking had quieted to an insistent purr. “It’s around here somewhere,” I said, getting out of the cab.
The courtyard we found ourselves in (the sun was setting at this point, and the shadows were long and gloomy, and the marble flagstones red as blood) was a mishmash of nineteenth-century chinoiserie. There were stone lions, statues of bearded men, twisted little trees peering up from crannies in the stone; and tall, obelisk-like columns in front of a weathered stone building that resembled a ruined ziggurat. It took me a moment to realize that the building was, in fact, the dragon’s head, so petrified by time and the slow process of dying that it had turned into an antique shrine. Someone still worshipped here at least. I could smell burning joss-sticks; in front of the pointed columns—which, I now could see, were actually the dragon’s teeth—somebody had left a silver tray containing a glass of wine, a pig’s head, and a garland of decaying jasmine.
“Yes, yes,” said Bob, “I see it too; I feel it even.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s the air or something. It tastes of the same bitterness that’s in the dragon’s fin soup. Only when you’ve taken a few breaths of it can you smell the underlying sensations… the joy, the love, the infinite regret.”
“Yes, yes, all right,” I said, “but don’t forget to ask him for a way out of our dilemma.”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Bob said.
I became all flustered at this. “Well, it’s just that, I don’t know, I’m too young, I don’t want to use up all my questions, it’s not the right time yet… you’re a mature person, you don’t —”
“… have that much longer to live, I suppose,” Bob said wryly.
“Oh, you know I didn’t mean it in quite that way.”
“Ah, but, sucking in the dragon’s breath the way we are, we too are forced to blurt out the truth, aren’t we?” he said. I didn’t like that.
“Don’t want to let the genie out of the bottle, do you?” Bob said. “Want to clutch it to your breast, don’t want to let go….”
“That’s my father you’re describing, not me.”
Bob smiled. “How do you work this thing?”
“You take the scroll and you tap the dragon’s lips.”
“Lips?”
I pointed at the long stucco frieze that extended all the way around the row of teeth. “And don’t forget to ask him,” I said yet ag
ain.
“All right. I will.”
Bob went up to the steps that led into the dragon’s mouth. On the second floor were two flared windows that were his nostrils; above them, two slitty windows seemed to be his eyes; the light from them was dim, and seemed to come from candlelight. I followed him two steps behind—it was almost as though we were already married!—and I was ready when he put out his hand for the scroll. Gingerly, he tapped the dragon’s teeth.
This was how the dragon’s voice sounded: it seemed at first to be the wind, or the tinkling of the temple bells, or the far-off lowing of the waterbuffalo that wallowed in the paddy; or, or, the distant cawing of a raven, the cry of a newborn child, the creak of a teak house on its stilts, the hiss of a slithering snake. Only gradually did these sounds coalesce into words, and once spoken the words seemed to hang in the air, to jangle and clatter like a loaded dishwasher.
The dragon said, We seldom have visitors anymore.
I said, “Quick, Bob, ask.”
“Okay, okay,” said Bob. He got ready, I think, to ask the dragon what I wanted him to ask, but instead, he blurted out a completely different question. “How different,” he said, “would the history of music be, if Mozart had managed to live another ten years?”
“Bob!” I said. “I thought you wanted to ask deep, cosmic questions about the nature of the universe —”
“Can’t get much deeper than that,” he said, and then the answer came, all at once, out of the twilight air. It was music of a kind. To me it sounded dissonant and disturbing; choirs singing out of tune, donkeys fiddling with their own tails. But you know, Bob stood there with his eyes closed, and his face was suffused with an ineffable serenity; and the music surged to a noisome clanging and a yowling and a caterwauling, and a slow smile broke out on his lips; and as it all began to die away he was whispering to himself, “Of course… apoggiaturas piled on appogiaturas, bound to lead to integral serialism in the mid-romantic period instead, then minimalism mating with impressionism running full tilt into the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and colliding with the pointillism of late Webern….”
At last he opened his eyes, and it was as though he had seen the face of God. But what about me and my miserable life? It came to me now. These were Bob’s idea of what constituted the really important questions of life. I couldn’t begrudge him a few answers. He’d probably save the main course for last; then we’d be out of there and could get on with our lives. I settled back to suffer through another arcane question, and it was, indeed, arcane.
Bob said, “You know, I’ve always been troubled by one of the hundred-letter words in Finnegans Wake. You know the words I mean, the supposed ‘thunderclaps’ that divide Joyce’s novel into its main sections… well, its the ninth one of those… I can’t seem to get it to split into its component parts. Maybe it seems trivial, but it’s worried me for the last twenty-nine years.”
The sky grew very dark then. Dry lightning forked and unforked across gathering clouds. The dragon spoke once more, but this time it seemed to be a cacophony of broken words, disjointed phonemes, strings of frenetic fricatives and explosive plosives; once again it was mere noise to me, but to Bob Halliday it was the sweetest music. I saw that gazing-on-the-face-of-divinity expression steal across his features one more time as again he closed his eyes. The man was having an orgasm. No wonder he didn’t need sex. I marveled at him. Ideas themselves were sensual things to him. But he didn’t lust after knowledge, he wasn’t greedy about it like Faust; too much knowledge could not damn Bob Halliday, it could only redeem him.
Once more, the madness died away. A monsoon shower had come and gone in the midst of the dragon’s response, and we were drenched; but presently, in the hot breeze that sprang up, our clothes began to dry.
“You’ve had your fun now, Bob. Please, please,” I said, “let’s get to the business at hand.”
Bob said, “All right.” He tapped the dragon’s lips again, and said, “Dragon, dragon, I want to know….”
The clouds parted and Bob was bathed in moonlight.
Bob said, “Is there a proof for Fermat’s Theorem?”
Well, I had had it with him now. I could see my whole life swirling down the toilet bowl of lost opportunities. “Bob!” I screamed, and began pummeling his stomach with my fists… the flesh was not as soft as I’d imagined it must be… I think I sprained my wrist. “What did I do wrong?”
“Bob, you idiot, what about us?”
“I’m sorry, Janice. Guess I got a little carried away.”
Yes, said the dragon. Presumably, since Bob had not actually asked him to prove Fermat’s Theorem, all he had to do was say yes or no.
What a waste. I couldn’t believe that Bob had done that to me. I was going to have to ask the dragon myself after all. I wrested the scroll from Bob’s hands, and furiously marched up the steps toward that row of teeth, phosphorescent in the moonlight.
“Dragon,” I screamed, “dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon.”
So, Ah Muoi, you’ve come to me at last. So good of you. I am old; I have seen my beginning and my end; it is in your eyes. You’ve come to set me free.
Our family tradition states clearly that it is always good to give the dragon the impression that you are going to set him free. He’s usually a lot more cooperative. Of course, you never do set him free. You would think that, being almost omniscient, the dragon would be wise to this, but mythical beasts always seem to have their fatal flaws. I was too angry for casuistric foreplay.
“You’ve got to tell me what I need to know.” Furiously, I whipped the crumbling stone with the old scroll.
I’m dying, you are my mistress; what else is new?
“How can I free myself from all this baggage that my family has laid on me?”
The dragon said:
There is a sleek swift segment of my soul
That whips against the waters of renewal;
You too have such a portion of yourself;
Divide it in a thousand pieces;
Make soup;
Then shall we all be free.
“That doesn’t make sense!” I said. The dragon must be trying to cheat me somehow. I slammed the scroll against the nearest tooth. The stucco loosened; I heard a distant rumbling. “Give me a straight answer, will you? How can I rid my father of the past that torments him and won’t let him face who he is, who I am, what we’re not?”
The dragon responded:
There is a sly secretion from my scales
That drives a man through madness into joy;
You too have such a portion of yourself;
Divide it in a thousand pieces;
Make soup;
Then shall we all be free.
This was making me really mad. I started kicking the tooth. I screamed, “Bob was right… you’re too senile, your mind is too clouded to see anything that’s important… all you’re good for is Bob’s great big esoteric enigmas… but I’m just a human being here, and I’m in bondage, and I want out… what’s it going to take to get a straight answer out of you?” Too late, I realized that I had phrased my last words in the form of a question. And the answer came on the jasmine-scented breeze even before I had finished asking:
There is a locked door deep inside my flesh
A dam against bewilderment and fear;
You too have such a portion of yourself;
Divide it in a thousand pieces;
Make soup;
Then shall we all be free.
But I wasn’t even listening, so sure was I that all was lost. For all my life I had been defined by others—my father, now Bob, now the dragon, even, briefly, by Linda Horovitz. I was a series of half-women, never a whole. Frustrated beyond repair, I flagellated the dragon’s lips with that scroll, shrieking like a pre-menstrual fishwife: “Why can’t I have a life like other people?” I’d seen the American girls with their casual ways, their cars, speaking of men as though they were hunks of meat; and the Thai girls, arrogant, plottin
g lovers’ trysts on their cellular phones as they breezed through the spanking-new shopping mall of their lives. Why was I the one who was trapped, chained up, enslaved? But I had used up the three questions.
I slammed the scroll so hard against the stucco that it began to tear.
“Watch out!” Bob cried. “You’ll lose your power over him!”
“Don’t speak to me of empowerment,” I shouted bitterly, and the parchment ripped all at once, split into a million itty-bitty pieces that danced like shooting stars in the brilliant moonlight.
That was it, then. I had cut off the family’s only source of income, too. I was going to have to marry Mr. Hong after all.
Then the dragon’s eyes lit up, and his jaws began slowly to open, and his breath, heady, bitter, and pungent, poured into the humid night air. “My God,” Bob said, “there is some life to him after all.”
My life, the dragon whispered, is but a few brief bittersweet moments of imagined freedom; for is not life itself enslavement to the wheel of sansara? Yet you, man and woman, base clay though you are, have been the means of my deliverance. I thank you.
The dragon’s mouth gaped wide. Within, an abyss of thickest blackness; but when I stared long and hard at it, I could see flashes of oh, such wondrous things… far planets, twisted forests, chaotic cities…
“Shall we go in?” said Bob.
“Do you want to?”
“Yes,” Bob said, “but I can’t, not without you; dying, he’s still your dragon, no one else’s; you know how it is; you kill your dragon, I kill mine.”
“Okay,” I said, realizing that now, finally, had come the moment for me to seize my personhood in my hands, “but come with me, for old times’ sake; after all, you did give me a pretty thorough tour of your dying dragon…”